Pig Latin Translator: Both Directions, Rules Explained

Type English on the left, read Pig Latin on the right, and switch the direction to go back the other way. Everything runs in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded.

How the Pig Latin Translator Works

Pig Latin moves the sound at the front of a word to the back and adds an ending. "Pig" becomes "igpay", "latin" becomes "atinlay".

The part that separates a working translator from a broken one is what counts as "the sound at the front". It is not one letter — it is the whole consonant cluster, everything before the first vowel. "String" starts with str, so it becomes ingstray, not "tringsay". "School" becomes oolschay. Get this wrong and the output is recognisably not Pig Latin to anyone who played it as a child.

Words that already start with a vowel have nothing to move, so they just take an ending — and that is where four different versions of the game part company. The selector above picks between them, because there is no correct answer, only the one you learned.

The reverse direction is harder than it looks, and it is the reason most translators are one-way only. That is covered below.

There Is No Official Version of Pig Latin

No dictionary defines Pig Latin. No body standardises it. It is a children's game passed on by ear, which means it drifted, and the drift is documented.

The clearest evidence is a study by Jessica Barlow published in Lingua in 2001. Thirty adults were taught Pig Latin and then tested, and the results showed disagreement not only between speakers but within the same speaker — the same person would handle the same cluster two different ways on different occasions. The disagreement clustered exactly where you would expect: words starting sp-, st-, str-, and words like "cute" and "beauty" where a hidden /j/ sound sits between the consonant and the vowel. A separate survey of 251 speakers presented at the Linguistic Society of America in 2003 reached the same conclusion about how much the dialects vary.

So when a translator tells you "the rule is X", it is describing one dialect and calling it the language. This page takes the opposite approach: the vowel ending is a setting, and the choices made in the engine are listed below as choices rather than facts.

The four vowel endings

Ending	"apple" becomes	Notes
-way	appleway	The default here. Widely taught and the one most reference material lists first.
-yay	appleyay	Equally established. It is the form used in the 1919 song that first put Pig Latin on record.
-hay	applehay	Common in some regions. Produces the most decoding ambiguity, because it collides with every word that genuinely starts with h.
-ay	appleay	The minimal form. Standard in programming exercises; less common in speech.

You will find pages claiming a specific percentage of speakers prefer one of these. Those numbers have no source. We are not going to invent one.

Why Decoding Gives You Two Answers

Type owhay into the decoder. You get back how / who — two answers, because there genuinely are two.

Both words start with a consonant cluster of a different length. "How" moves h; "who" moves wh. Once the cluster is at the back, nothing records how long it was, so "owhay" is exactly as much one word as the other. The information was destroyed during encoding, and no cleverness recovers it.

This is not a rare edge case. Here are real collisions, and every one of them is a pair of ordinary words:

Pig Latin	Could be
owhay	how, who
opstay	stop, tops
ortspay	sport, ports
ipslay	slip, lips
ordsway	sword, words
inthay	thin, hint
ipstray	strip, trips
intspray	prints, sprint

The vowel ending you choose adds a second layer of collision on top. With -hay selected, "airhay" could be "air" or "hair", and "ourhay" could be "our" or "hour" — because the ending is indistinguishable from a real word-initial h. With -way, "inway" is either "in" or "win". The plain -ay dialect is the worst of the four: "eatay" is either "eat" or "tea".

Other translators return one answer and say nothing. Ours returns every reading that English permits, separated by a slash, and lets you choose. Candidates are filtered by whether the reconstructed cluster is one English actually allows — "psto" is not offered for "opstay", because no English word begins with pst.

Capitals, Apostrophes, Qu and Y

These are the cases that separate translators, and almost nobody documents which choice they made. Here is every one this engine makes.

Input	Output	The choice, and why
Hello	Ellohay	Capitalisation belongs to the word's position in the sentence, not to the letter. The shape is reapplied after the move — so HELLO becomes ELLOHAY.
string	ingstray	The whole cluster moves, not just the first letter.
question	estionquay	qu travels as a unit — the u is doing consonant work, not vowel work. "square" becomes "aresquay".
yellow	ellowyay	A y at the start of a word is a consonant.
my	ymay	A y anywhere else is a vowel, so it stops the cluster. "rhythm" becomes "ythmrhay".
don't	on'tday	The apostrophe is part of the word and stays where it is inside it. "John's" becomes "Ohn'sjay".
hello!	ellohay!	Punctuation, digits and spacing pass through untouched and in place.
nth	nthay	No vowel to move anything in front of, so the word takes the ending unchanged.

The one that has no good answer: spelling versus sound

Pig Latin is really a game about sounds, but every practical translator works on spelling, and the two disagree more often than you would think.

Hour and honest start with a silent h. By sound they are vowel-initial and should take the vowel ending; by spelling they start with a consonant. This engine follows spelling, so "hour" becomes "ourhay". Herb is worse still — the h is silent in American English and pronounced in British English, so the correct answer depends on who is speaking. Going the other way, university and use are spelled with a vowel but begin with a /j/ sound.

There is no fix, only a choice, and spelling is the choice that behaves predictably for someone typing text. It is worth knowing that a purist saying it aloud would do some of these differently.

Where Pig Latin Came From

It has nothing to do with Latin. "Latin" here is nineteenth-century slang for speech that sounds deliberately incomprehensible, which is why the same era produced Dog Latin, Goose Latin and Hog Latin alongside it. Hog Latin is recorded earlier than Pig Latin — around 1807 versus 1889 — and an 1897 account lists the whole family as though the animal in front were more or less interchangeable.

Confusingly, those early references are not to this game. They describe mock-Latin wordplay, a different joke entirely. A game recorded in The Galaxy in 1866 under the name "hog latin" worked by adding -ge to every syllable: "Wig-ge you-ge go-ge wig-ge me-ge?" That is not Pig Latin either.

The modern form shows up in a 1909 Little Nemo comic strip, and reaches wide circulation with a 1919 record — "Pig Latin Love (I yay Ove-lay)", sung by Arthur Fields. The subtitle is the interesting part: it comes with a translation printed underneath, which suggests that in 1919 the game still needed explaining.

Two Pig Latin words made it into English properly. Ixnay (from "nix") has a Merriam-Webster entry, recorded as an adverb from 1928 and a verb from 1934. Amscray (from "scram") is the other. Both survived because they were useful for saying something in front of someone without being understood — which was always the point.

Pig Latin, Ubbi Dubbi and the Rest

Pig Latin belongs to a family of language games, and they split into three types by what they actually do to a word.

Game	Method	"hello" becomes
Pig Latin	Rearranges — moves the onset to the end	ellohay
Ubbi Dubbi	Inserts — puts "ub" before each vowel sound	hubellubo
Gibberish	Inserts — puts "idig" before each vowel sound	hidigellidigo
Back slang	Reverses — says the word backwards	olleh

That difference decides whether a game can be undone. Insertion games are perfectly reversible: remove every "ub" and you have the original word back, with no ambiguity at all. Rearrangement is not, because moving a piece without recording how big it was throws information away — which is exactly why this page's decoder sometimes has to offer you two words.

Ubbi Dubbi is the best known of the others, mostly because the PBS children's programme Zoom used it through the 1970s and again after its 1999 revival.

What People Use It For

• Passing notes and messages that need a moment of decoding
• Teaching children about syllables, onsets and how sounds move
• Decoding Pig Latin someone else wrote, including the ambiguous words
• Checking your own implementation against the tricky cases like qu and y
• Writing captions and usernames with a bit of playground nostalgia
• Settling an argument about whether it is -way, -yay or -hay

Frequently Asked Questions