Her childhood diary was filled with weird symbols she couldn’t decode—so she dared the internet to crack it

People throughout the years have kept personal diaries to create archives of their most imaginative ideas or secretive thoughts. While some diarists write their journals in their mother language, others prefer to be a little wacky and record their most intimate thoughts in codes and ciphers. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, scribbled his diaries in “mirror script,” per the Victoria & Albert Museum. Author Beatrix Potter also laid down her inner world not in words but in codes. Following the footsteps of prominent coders, 22-year-old Ellie (u/grudginglyadmitted) from Oregon penned her diaries in Morse code. Recently, she took to Reddit to share a screengrab of an old journal page written in Morse code, saying that she no longer remembered how to decipher its meaning. Reddit users stepped in to help.

HowStuffWorks explains that Morse code is a long-distance communication method developed by Samuel Morse, a businessman and portraitist. In 1825, while he was working on a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette in Washington, D.C., he received a letter that said his young wife had died in their home in Connecticut. But by the time he received the letter, it was too late for him to arrive at the funeral. The incident shattered him, and he ended up inventing a long-distance language that would revolutionize communication for years to come. The innovative language works on dots and dashes, whimsically called “dits” and “dashes.” Although the age of these dots and dashes is over, the charm this code carries can never be dulled, especially for Ellie.

“I have entire journals written in code I no longer remember how to translate,” Ellie captioned the screenshot. In just 2 days, more than 99,000 people jumped in to offer translations to her code. One user, u/oppaisama, printed out the photo in black and white and shared the entire text, fully deciphered. They shared a transcript of the code, revealing that the code was a recipe involving onions, shallots, garlic, butter, sushi rice, white wine, lemon juice, and olive oil. Other users said they were impressed by the translation and were left speechless.

As for Ellie, this comment was spot-on. She revealed to Newsweek that the code on the page was actually the recipe for a risotto. "Cooking was another one of my main interests at the time—and to be fair, still is— and risotto was one of my absolute favorites to make, so I feel confident the commenters who deciphered the page by hand were correct," she said.

Many Reddit cryptologists tried decrypting the code using AI and ChatGPT, whereas others provided hints on how Ellie could solve her own codes. “Some of the characters seem quite close to the Dwarvish script from DnD. Perhaps that may have been a source of inspiration in your cipher? Unsure if that might help. It seems like some of the other comments using AI to translate look quite promising,” explained u/albogaster. Meanwhile, the page inspired someone to write their own diary in Morse code. u/leading-programmer-6 complimented Ellie by saying, “This is actually a pretty cool way of writing Morse code, and I might use a similar version of it for myself!”