Gallifreyan is the made-up writing system from the Doctor's home planet in Doctor Who. For most of the show, up through the Fifteenth Doctor, those circular symbols on screen didn't really mean anything. They were just decoration, no actual rules behind them. That changed with a prop made for the Fifteenth Doctor's sonic screwdriver, which used a script pretty close to a real, rule-based Gallifreyan to spell out an actual sentence.

The Gallifreyan most fans use these days, including the one on that screwdriver, comes from Sherman's Gallifreyan, a fan-made system created by artist Loren Sherman back in 2011. Unlike the show's decoration, Sherman actually built real rules for it: a full circular alphabet where you nest letters inside circles to spell words, and it can genuinely be read and written.

The version used here is Linear Gallifreyan, an adaptation I made to a Gallifreyan font made by the Reddit user Nihil_427 that was based on Sherman's circular alphabet. Instead of nesting letters inside circles, it lines up one symbol per letter, just like our regular alphabet. That's what makes it possible to "translate" text into Gallifreyan simply by swapping the font.

How to read it: every letter (A-Z), every digit (0-9), and a few punctuation marks each get their own symbol in the font. There's no phonetic rule to memorize, it's just a straight letter-by-letter swap, so you only need to recognize each symbol's shape. One extra detail: lowercase vowels connect to the consonant right before them, while capital letters and capital vowels stand on their own and don't connect to anything.