Braille Alphabet

How do braille cells and dot numbers work?

Each braille cell has six possible dot positions. Reading down the left column they are dots 1, 2 and 3; down the right column they are dots 4, 5 and 6. A letter is defined purely by which of those six dots are raised, which is why braille is always written as a list of dot numbers: D is dots 1-4-5, R is dots 1-2-3-5.

The alphabet is built in three tidy lines of ten. Letters A to J use only the top four positions (dots 1, 2, 4 and 5). Letters K to T repeat those same shapes with dot 3 added. U, V, X, Y and Z repeat them again with dots 3 and 6 added. W is the odd one out, dots 2-4-5-6, because French had no W when Louis Braille designed the system.

That structure is the fastest way to learn it. Once you know A to J, you know K to T (add dot 3) and most of U to Z (add dots 3 and 6), so there are really only ten shapes plus two rules to remember.

How do you write capital letters in braille?

Braille letters have no separate capital shapes. A capital is marked by putting the capital indicator, dot 6 on its own, immediately in front of the letter. So a capital A is dot 6 followed by dot 1. For a word in full capitals, the indicator is doubled before the word.

That is why braille text often looks longer than print: indicators for capitals, numbers and emphasis all take a cell of their own.

What about braille numbers and punctuation?

Numbers reuse the letter shapes A to J, with the numeric indicator (dots 3-4-5-6) in front to say that digits follow, so A after the indicator means 1 and J means 0. There is a full chart of 1 to 100 on our braille numbers page.

Punctuation uses the lower dots of the cell, and contracted (Grade 2) braille adds shortcuts for common words and letter groups. The chart on this page is Grade 1 braille, one cell per letter, which is what almost every online braille chart shows.

Who invented braille?

The system was created by Louis Braille in France, who published it in 1829 after developing it as a teenager at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Blind from an accident in early childhood, he reworked Charles Barbier's raised-dot night writing into the compact six-dot cell that blind readers still use today.

Braille is not a language and not a cipher. It is a tactile writing system, so the same six-dot cells are used to write English, French, Arabic, Chinese and mathematics, each with its own code built on top of the cell.