The Dorabella Cipher is an enciphered letter written and enciphered by Edward Elgar to Miss Dora Penny (the letter was accompanied by another dated July 14,1897). She was never able to decipher it and its meaning remains unknown to this day. The cipher, consisting of 87 characters spread over 3 lines, appears to be made up from an alphabet of 24 symbols, with each symbol consisting of either 1, 2, or 3 approximate semicircles, oriented in one of 8 directions. The orientation of several of the characters is ambiguous. A small dot, meaning and significance unknown, appears after the fifth character on the third line. A count of the 87 characters reveals a symbol frequency very close to that that would be expected if the cipher were a simple substitution cipher, based on a plain text in English, but attempts to decipher it along these lines have so far proved fruitless, leading to speculation the cipher may be more complex.
External links
- The Elgar Cipher Group A discussion group for those interested in trying to solve the cipher.
- "Can You Solve Elgar's 'Other' Enigma?"
- Dunin, Elonka, 2006, The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, ISBN 0-7867-1726-2 (contains an image of the cipher)
- Breaking Elgar's enigmatic code
