Letters to Numbers Converter

Letters J to Z take two digits, so a code written without gaps can be read more than one way. ABC written as 123 could just as well be AW (1, 23) or LC (12, 3). Longer strings get worse quickly, and the solver has no way of knowing which reading you meant.

Pick a separator before you hand the code out. Spaces are easiest to read aloud, dashes survive being copied into a message without collapsing, and commas suit a worksheet. The tool marks word breaks with a slash so 8 9 4 5 / 20 8 5 can't be mistaken for one long word.

A puzzle that deliberately leaves the gaps out is a harder, different puzzle. If you go that way, check that your intended answer is the only real word among the possible readings.

The table under the result adds each word's numbers together. Word sums come up in maths puzzles ("which animal is worth exactly 50?"), in classroom number practice, and in "what is my name worth" games. Some numerology systems use the same A1Z26 sums under the name simple English gematria, but there is no evidence those totals mean anything beyond arithmetic.

Programmers and cipher textbooks usually number from A = 0. In code the position is simply the character code minus 65 ('H'.charCodeAt(0) - 65 is 7), and a Caesar shift becomes clean modular arithmetic:

Excel and Google Sheets name columns A to Z, then AA, AB and on. That's a counting system with 26 digits and no zero, so a column's number isn't its letters run through A1Z26 one by one. Work through the letters left to right, multiplying by 26 each time:

In the sheet itself, =COLUMN(INDIRECT("XFD1")) returns 16384, and =SUBSTITUTE(ADDRESS(1,28,4),"1","") turns 28 back into AB. The column mode above accepts cell references like $C$7 too and ignores the row.

A1Z26 only covers the 26 basic Latin letters. With the accent option on, the tool strips accents before converting, so Café becomes 3 1 6 5 and über becomes 21 2 5 18. German ß becomes SS (19 19), the same as when it's written in capitals.

That suits English-style puzzles but not every language. Spanish counts Ñ as its own letter after N, so a Spanish puzzle setter numbering their own alphabet would give Ñ 15 and push O to Z up by one. Untick the option to keep ñ, é and the rest out of the conversion. Letters with no A–Z base, such as Ø, Æ, Greek or Cyrillic, are always left as typed and listed under the result so you can decide how to handle them.

Digits and punctuation in your text are dropped from the code so that a 3 in the original can't be confused with C.