Using the hieroglyphics translator
Type a name and each letter becomes the hieroglyph for its sound. Cartouche draws the oval round each word, the way a pharaoh's name was written, and it's on to start with because a name is what most people come here to write.
sh, ch and kh each had a sign of their own in Egyptian. Leave them on One sign each for the Egyptian spelling, or switch to Letter by letter to match an English spelling sign for sign.
The signs are real Unicode characters, so they paste into a message or a document. Whoever reads it needs a font for them, and plenty of phones and computers don't have one. This page brings its own.
What this is, and what it isn't
This spells English sounds with Egyptian signs. It doesn't translate into the Egyptian language, so "hello" written here is still English.
Scribes had over 700 signs to work with. Many stood for two or three consonants, or for a whole word, and many were silent determinatives that told the reader what kind of word came before. Only about two dozen stood for a single sound, and those are the ones used here.
Egyptian didn't write vowels, and it had no C, O, V or X of its own. So some letters share a sign. C and K both get the basket, O, U and W all get the quail chick, and V borrows the horned viper that writes F. That's also why swapping back can't always recover your spelling: 𓅱 comes back as w, the sound it stood for.
The hieroglyph alphabet
The hieroglyph alphabetstringmash.com/hieroglyphics-translator
Two queens' names
In the early 1820s the name Ptolemy was known in hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone, where the Greek text named the king and the Egyptian put a cartouche round him. William Bankes had noticed that an obelisk from Philae carried the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra, in Greek and in cartouches.
Jean-François Champollion set the two cartouches side by side. Both names contain P, O and L, and the signs in those positions were the same. From the letters the two names shared he worked out others, then read further foreign names in the same way.
He announced the method on 27 September 1822 in his Lettre à M. Dacier. The lion this tool uses for L comes from names like these. Scribes of the Ptolemaic era wrote the L of Greek names with it.
Related conversions
Runes and Ogham work the same way here, spelling English with another people's letters. Both were real alphabets, so the fit is closer than it is for hieroglyphs. To see the block each sign comes from, paste the output into the Unicode converter.
Questions
How do I write my name in hieroglyphs?
Type it in the box. Each letter becomes the sign for its sound, and the cartouche round it is how a royal name was written. A name with sh, ch or kh in it comes out a sign shorter, since each of those is one sign.
What is a cartouche?
The oval drawn round a royal name, with a line at one end. It was first used around the end of the Third Dynasty and became common under Sneferu, the first king of the Fourth.
Can I translate English into Ancient Egyptian?
Not with a letter swap. Egyptian had its own words and grammar, and writing it well takes a scholar and a dictionary. What this tool does is transliterate, which is how the [Penn Museum's](https://www.penn.museum/cgi/hieroglyphsreal.php) "write your name" activity works too.
Why do I see boxes instead of hieroglyphs?
The device you're reading on has no font for the Egyptian Hieroglyphs block. They show here because the page brings Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs with it, but a message you send will only show the signs if the reader's device has a font too.