Levin Roy · September 24, 2024 · 9 min read 
Have you ever wondered if the strange text you see on the enchantment table in Minecraft has any meaning? Can it even be read? Let’s find out.
As the enchantments you get from an option are randomized, the enigmatic glyphs staring at you take on even greater importance. Especially since the symbols aren’t random—the glyphs repeat, and there are exactly 26 of them, mirroring the English language alphabet.
In this guide, we will go over everything there is to know about the Minecraft enchanting table language, from its history and origin to its meaning and relevance in the game. We will also discuss how you can translate the language and all the online tools to help in this endeavor.
Minecraft Enchanting Table Language
Procedural generation is at the heart of Minecraft. The entire map is generated when starting a new game, with its own distribution of biomes and resources.
This randomization is seen in other aspects of the game systems as well. Minecraft’s enchantment table, for example, displays every enchantment as a collection of words in a weird-looking language, indecipherable at a glance.
This makes it impossible to tell what a particular enchantment does by the text alone, besides giving it the look of a mysterious runic inscription from a fantasy world. And the letters aren’t entirely random — they are in a different alphabet, with each symbol corresponding to a letter in English.
The symbols resemble blocky glyphs, which is intentional; it can be represented accurately even with square pixels on a low resolution. It isn’t designed to be handwritten and has no real flow, so sentences are just a bunch of glyphs.
Role of Enchanting in Minecraft
Once you have crafted a tool with the best material available, enchanting is the only way to further upgrade it. A staple borrowed from other fantasy video games, enchanting lets you give special, magical properties to any piece of equipment.
The exact effects of enchantment vary greatly – different tools and equipment can access different enchantments. Any piece of armor, for example, can be enchanted with Blast Protection (really handy if you like throwing around TNT), while only an axe can be given Cleaving.
The enchanting process itself is simple enough. You need to place your item on an enchantment table and select one of the three options that appear, offering Lapis Lazuli and experience points to imbue the item.
These options are in strange glyphs (more on this in the next section), but hovering your pointer over the option displays at least one of the enchantments that would be applied by the option (the actual enchantment ends up applying several). As you might expect, choosing a particular enchantment is difficult, as this list is randomized.
It does depend on your level, and enchanting anything resets the list, so once you have enough experience and lapis lazuli, it might be worth it to go on an enchanting spree until you find the one you want.
What Is Minecraft’s Enchanting Table Language?
If you try enchanting anything in Minecraft, you will notice that the enchantments aren’t in English but a cryptic language you have never seen. This is Minecraft’s enchantment table language, used to uniquely identify every enchantment.
But it is not a language created by Minecraft – it is from the Commander Keen game series by Microsoft. The Standard Galactic Alphabet (SGA) was created to make various texts and signs look more alien in the game.
This is the same reason Minecraft borrowed the alphabet, combining the SGA with procedural generation to create esoteric representations for the enchantments in the game.
And this works well—each letter of SGA has a blocky appearance, making it seem like a rare runic language used in ceremonies instead of a flowing language for everyday use. Part of why it is designed in such a way is to be compatible with low-res pixel art, allowing for SGA to be easily written with blocky pixels.
How to Read Enchanting Table Language in Minecraft
Surprisingly enough, reading the enchantment table language isn’t that hard. This is because it is not strictly a different fictional language; it is simply a different script that switches the English alphabet for a different one.
It’s called a substitution cipher. A system like this has the same number of letters as in English, making it easy to translate once you know the key. All you need to do is to match every symbol with its corresponding English letter.
If that sounds tedious, you can just use an online translation tool – these will usually have an easy interface to help you enter the enchantment table words and get their English equivalent. We will demonstrate the process using the dcode website.
- On the right, you will find all the symbols of the Standard Galactic Alphabet listed. Clicking on any symbol enters it, letting you construct sentences the sentences you see on the enchantment table in Minecraft.
- Hit the Decrypt button below it once you have entered the entire phrase.
- The translation will be generated in a small box on the left—you can easily miss it due to the poorly designed interface, but the result text will be bolded.
Best Minecraft Enchanting Table Language Translators
You don’t need to learn the Galactic Alphabet yourself to be able to read the words written on Minecraft’s enchantment table – there are plenty of great translators available online. You simply put in the cryptic phrases and get the English language results.
You can do it the other way, too. Put in the English text and convert it into its SGA equivalent. The utility is limited, though, unless you want to create cool-looking messages or integrate the glyphs into your DnD session.
- The best Minecraft enchantment table language translator online is Decode’s webpage for the Standard Galactic Alphabet. It is one of the few tools that provides an easy way to enter phrases in the enchantment table language and translate them into English. It also does it the other way around – enter English sentences and convert them into SGA images (or Unicode characters if you want it that way).
- Lingojam’s SGA converter has a cleaner interface, making it our second-best pick. The only problem is that while converting English words into SGA is easy, translating enchantment table words requires you to type the message in the SGA font.
- An Android app by Black Envelop lets you type in English and get its SGA equivalent easily. Translating SGA text is trickier but can be done by spotting which symbol is associated with which English letter. Still, this tool is not recommended for that purpose.
- If you are looking for a handy reference to convert SGA to English or vice versa, this page has a color-coded table. You must translate the words manually, which is easy enough once you know what each glyph stands for.
What Is the Enchantment Table Language Used for in Minecraft?
The enchantment table language is fascinating, but unfortunately, it has no practical value in the game. The translations of the words have no bearing on the enchantments you can create or their effects.
The language is only used to include easter eggs and references to other media, including the works of H.P. Lovecraft (particularly the phrase “dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”) and, of course, the Keen video game series.
And even that’s a small subsection – for the most part, the enchantment table sports a random smattering of words that individually translate to something but are not meaningful as a sentence.
Is the Minecraft Enchantment Table Language Readable?
Well, yes and no. Yes, because each word of the strange-looking script can be translated into English and usually into meaningful words. No, because the sequence translates to random English words, no meaningful sentences can be found.
Ultimately, Minecraft’s enchantment table language aims to confer an aura of mystique and grandeur to the enchantment process, with the occasional Easter egg thrown in to reward the diligent translator. It’s not a readable guide to the enchantments themselves.
In 2011, when the first screenshots of the in-development enchanting system were revealed, the enchantments translated into actual sentences that were a cheeky nod to fans who noticed and translated them.
The first enchantment reads: “Well Played Internets You Are Good” (yes, the misspelling of the internet is in the original screenshot).
The second says, “These Names Will Be Random And Confusing,” while the third informs us that “Each Spell Costs Experience Levels.”
With these three lines, Notch – the now legendary creator of the game – clarified the enchantment system, making it clear that the glyphs were going to be random words, and while they could be translated, they wouldn’t amount to anything meaningful.
What Is the Galactic Alphabet in Minecraft?
The text on the enchanting table isn’t just in a different language; it’s in a different script. Many players immediately recognized the script as the Standard Galactic Alphabet, which features as an alien language in the Commander Keen games.
Designed by Tom Hall in Keen 1, the script originated as modified versions of the standard alphabet to create an alien-looking “Exit” sign. He kept creating more similar signs, ultimately ending up with a new version of every English letter, creating the Standard Galactic Alphabet.
Years later, Notch, the creator of Minecraft, picked up this very same alphabet to represent enchantments. The aim was simple: giving a magical and otherworldly flair to randomly generated English words in a different script.
And it works – every time you put a piece of equipment into the enchanting table, you get three options written in strange blocky glyphs that look arcane. Hovering over the options gives you one of the effects but still leaves enough mystery for the enchantment to seem more magic than science.
Conclusion
Like most gameplay aspects in Minecraft, Enchanting is a simple but deep system with which you can spend hours tinkering. Unlike the other systems, it also comes with glyphs in a strange new language – and they are not just gibberish.
Written in the Standard Galactic Alphabet from the Commander Keen games, the script is just a cipher for words written in English, easily translated when you know the corresponding alphabets.
And while they don’t have any gameplay significance (the words are chosen randomly from a list), they lend a certain mystique to enchanting. Some words even refer to works like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu novels.
