Write your name in hieroglyphs
Spell the name as it sounds. The Desk picks Egyptian sound signs, shows each step, and says where it had to guess.
Cartouche Desk
Name to hieroglyphs, by soundA modern phonetic rendering, not a translation.
Show your working
- Normalise. Lower case, accents removed: "cleopatra".
- Sounds to signs. c gives k (basket with handle, V31): hard c sounds as k. l gives r (mouth, D21): Egyptian had no clear l; r stands in. e skipped: a vowel inside the name is not written. o skipped: a vowel inside the name is not written. p gives p (stool, Q3). a skipped: a vowel inside the name is not written. t gives t (bread loaf, X1). r gives r (mouth, D21). a skipped: a vowel inside the name is not written.
- Vowels. Egyptian writing left most vowels out, so only a vowel at the start of the name is written. This is a modern convention, not how a scribe would have spelled it.
Names stay in your browser. Nothing you type is sent or stored.
How it works
Ancient Egyptian had signs for consonants and almost none for vowels, so a modern name has to be turned into sounds first. The Desk looks the name up in a list of worked examples, and otherwise applies a fixed set of sound rules. Read the sound rules guide for the reasons behind each choice.
The oval ring is a cartouche. In antiquity only kings and queens had one, so see how to read a cartouche, or compare your name with real ones on the list of pharaohs. The alphabet sheet shows every sign the Desk can use.
Names stay in your browser. The page makes no request when you type, and nothing is saved.