Our regular Puzzle Tool Highlight series is a collection of short posts highlighting useful tools that we regularly use in our puzzlecraft. Each post details a single or small collection of similar tools that can be used to create or enhance puzzles. We hope you enjoy them!
Pinterest is a visual discovery and social media platform where users can find, save, and share images and ideas on various topics. It functions like a digital pinboard, allowing users to “pin” images, videos, and links to personalized boards for organization and future reference.
Once you’ve created a board for a specific subject, Pinterest’s algorithm excels at identifying similar images to what you’ve already pinned to the board, and Pinterest has a wealth of images related to alternative alphabets, fictional languages, and other writing methods. If you need to find an obscure alphabet to use in a simple substitution cipher, or even something a bit more complicated, Pinterest is your best friend.
Check out our “Linguistics” board for an example. Feel free to grab some images from there to begin your own board, or just follow ours. Pinterest will regularly suggest additional images of alternative alphabets and languages ranging from Angelic Script to the Zentradi Alphabet and everything in-between.
Omniglot
After browsing what Pinterest has to offer for a while, you’ll notice that some of the images come from a website called Omniglot. Omniglot is an online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages. They have sections on writing systems, constructed scripts, and languages.
While a little less useful than Pinterest for finding something to use quickly, and having far fewer fictional languages than Pinterest, Omniglot has an exhaustive list of alphabets and real languages, both in active use, and limited use or dead languages, as well as a lot of other useful tools and interesting features such as undeciphered scripts and puzzling questions from users!