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The Dorabella Cipher is an enciphered text written by composer Edward Elgar to Dora Penny, which accompanied a plaintext letter dated July 14, 1897.

Penny never deciphered it and its meaning remains unknown. The cipher, consisting of 87 characters spread over 3 lines, appears to be made up from 24 symbols, each symbol consisting of 1, 2, or 3 approximate semicircles oriented in one of 8 directions (the orientation of several characters is ambiguous). A small dot appears after the fifth character on the third line.

Dora Penny (1874–1964) was the daughter of the Reverend Alfred Penny (1845–1935) of Wolverhampton. Dora's mother died in February 1874, six days after giving birth to Dora, after which her father worked for many years as a missionary in Melanesia. In 1895 Dora's father remarried, and Dora's stepmother was a friend of the writer Caroline Alice Elgar, who was the wife of Edward Elgar. In July 1897 the Penny family invited Edward and Alice Elgar to stay at the Wolverhampton Rectory for a few days. Edward and Dora liked one another and remained friends for the rest of the composer's life: Elgar named Variation 10 of his 1899 Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma) Dorabella as a dedication to Dora Penny. On returning to Great Malvern on 14 July 1897 Alice wrote a letter of thanks to the Penny family. Edward Elgar inserted a note with cryptic writing: he pencilled the name 'Miss Penny' on the reverse. This note lay in a drawer for forty years and became generally known when Dora had it reproduced in her memoir Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation, published by Methuen Publishing in 1937. Dora claimed that she had never been able to read the note, which she assumed to be a cipher message. The Dorabella Cipher is not the only document penned by Elgar that contains the approximately semi-circular characters. At a concert in April 1886 (over ten years prior to his letter to Penny), he annotated a concert program with 18 similar characters followed by an underscore. The symbols also appear in a 1920s notebook of Elgar, along with diagrams resembling clock faces, and on the so-called "Cryptogram card", which forms part of a series of cards detailing Elgar's solution to a cryptographic challenge set in Pall Mall magazine in 1896.

The length of this text is 109 letters (ignoring the parenthetic note on Greek), whereas the original text contains only 87 or 88 characters: Sams claimed the surplus letters are implied by phonetic shorthand. Roberts claims a solution via a simple substitution cipher and offers a statistical justification: In December 2011, Canadian cryptographer enthusiast Richard Henderson claimed to have found the correct clear text, encoded once again as a simple substitution cipher (with two letters as nulls), although some details remain to be worked out. The secondary message below was identified as the word RATS, which Packwood believed was a playful acknowledgement from Sir Edward to the individual that broke his cipher. Packwood's method involved rearranging the cipher based on the position of several dots, which Packwood identified as representing a conductor's baton, and then arbitrarily shifting the presumed values of each glyph independently until a message emerged. In a 2023 study, Viktor Wase applied cipher-solving computer algorithms to the Dorabella cipher and discovered that it is unlikely to be a monoalphabetic substitution cipher in English or Latin. This was done by showing that these algorithms can solve ciphers that are as short as Dorabella, yet they fail to solve the Dorabella cipher. The Elgar Society advertised a Dorabella Cipher Competition in 2007 to mark the 150th anniversary of Elgar's birth. Dunin, Elonka, 2006, The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, ISBN 0-7867-1726-2 (contains an image of the cipher)

Quick Facts

• The cipher, consisting of 87 characters spread over 3 lines, appears to be made up from 24 symbols, each symbol consisting of 1, 2, or 3 approximate semicircles oriented in one of 8 directions (the orientation of several characters is ambiguous).
• In a 2023 study, Viktor Wase applied cipher-solving computer algorithms to the Dorabella cipher and discovered that it is unlikely to be a monoalphabetic substitution cipher in English or Latin.
• This was done by showing that these algorithms can solve ciphers that are as short as Dorabella, yet they fail to solve the Dorabella cipher.
• The Dorabella Cipher is not the only document penned by Elgar that contains the approximately semi-circular characters.
• The Elgar Society advertised a Dorabella Cipher Competition in 2007 to mark the 150th anniversary of Elgar's birth.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Dorabella Cipher". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.