Columnar Transposition Cipher
EODAEASRENEIELORCEECWDVFT
Encode text by columns
The keyword's letters are ranked alphabetically (ties broken left to right) to fix the order in which the grid's columns are read. A longer keyword makes a wider grid, but the cipher stays easy to break because the alphabet of characters never changes — only their positions do.
When to use this tool
Reach for the columnar transposition cipher when a puzzle, CTF challenge, or classroom lesson calls for a keyword-driven transposition — one that reorders characters instead of replacing them. It is the natural companion to the Rail Fence cipher here: the message is written row by row into a grid with one column per keyword letter, then the columns are read out in the order their letters fall alphabetically, scrambling the text while keeping every character intact.
Privacy and limitations
Everything runs locally in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere. This is a classical cipher for puzzles and learning, not real encryption — a single columnar transposition is straightforward to break, and this tool does not attempt double or multiple transposition, the Myszkowski variant, or any automatic solving. Because it is a pure transposition, every character including spaces, digits, and punctuation is preserved and merely repositioned, with no padding added, so encoding then decoding with the same keyword returns the original exactly.