Enchanting Table Language: How to Read the Symbols

The strange symbols on the enchanting table are the Standard Galactic Alphabet (SGA), a cipher where each symbol is one English letter. Tom Hall created it for the Commander Keen games in the early 1990s, and Minecraft borrowed it in 2011. The words it spells out are random and never tell you which enchantment you’ll get.

This page is about the text. For building the table itself, see how to make an enchanting table.

Where you see it

• On the three enchantment buttons in the table’s menu. Each button shows a few SGA words.
• As floating glyphs drifting from nearby bookshelves into the table. These particles disappear if you set particles to Minimal.

Reading it

The SGA is a straight substitution: 26 symbols for A to Z, no numbers, no punctuation, and no difference between upper and lower case. Once you have a chart (the Minecraft Wiki has one, and fan-made “enchanting table translator” sites let you type in English), you can read any button in a few seconds.

What you’ll find is gibberish built from a list of a few dozen words. That list hides some jokes:

• “the”, “elder” and “scrolls”, a dig at Bethesda, whose parent company once challenged Mojang over the name of its card game Scrolls.
• “klaatu”, “berata” and “niktu”, a misspelled nod to “Klaatu barada nikto” from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still.
• “xyzzy”, the magic word from Colossal Cave Adventure.
• “embiggen”, from The Simpsons.
• “cthulhu”, “rlyeh”, “fhtagn” and friends, from H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu.

None of the words use the letters J or Q, though both letters have symbols and show up in the floating particles.

When Notch first showed the menu in October 2011, his three buttons read “Well Played Internets You Are Good”, “These Names Will Be Random And Confusing” and “Each Spell Costs Experience Levels”. The second one is the honest answer to what the text means.

What actually tells you the enchantment

Hover over an option (or tap it on mobile and console) and the game shows one enchantment it will apply, like “Efficiency III . . . ?”. That’s the only clue. The item can get more enchantments than the one shown, and you can’t see those until you commit.

If you want a specific enchantment, the table is the wrong tool. Get the book from a librarian or a chest and apply it on an anvil; how to use enchanted books explains how. The full list of enchantments shows which ones the table can roll at all.