How to Read (and Write) Circular Gallifreyan

Circular Gallifreyan is not an official BBC product. A fan artist named Loren Sherman invented it in 2011, and the Doctor Who fandom adopted it as the de facto way to write the Time Lord language on paper. The BBC has never published a canonical Gallifreyan writing system. What you see on the show is decorative graphics, not a functional script. Circular Gallifreyan is the fan-made system that actually has rules you can learn and use.

The system maps English letters to geometric shapes: lines, arcs, and dots arranged in concentric circles. Each word becomes a circle. Consonants sit on the outer ring. Vowels go in the inner ring. It looks alien because the shapes are circular, but it is a 1:1 English cipher at its core. You are encoding English, not translating into a fictional language.

You can try the visual encoding yourself with our Gallifreyan Translator, which renders English text into Circular Gallifreyan-style circles. It follows Sherman's conventions. If you want to compare it to other fan-adopted fictional scripts, the Standard Galactic Alphabet from Commander Keen is another English substitution cipher dressed up as alien text.

Circular Gallifreyan is a constructed writing system, not a constructed language. That distinction matters. A constructed language like Dothraki or Na'vi has its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Circular Gallifreyan has none of that. It is a way to write English (or any language you want) using circular shapes instead of the Latin alphabet. The phonemes, words, and grammar are whatever language you bring to it.

Sherman's system is the most widely used Gallifreyan script in the fan community. There are other fan systems, including "Old High Gallifreyan" variants and linear Gallifreyan experiments, but Circular Gallifreyan is the one you will find on Reddit, Tumblr, Etsy pins, and convention badges. It won because it is learnable in an afternoon and produces visually striking results that look like the circular graphics on the show.

The Unicode Consortium's encoding principles describe the difference between a script (a writing system) and a language (a spoken/written system with grammar). Circular Gallifreyan is a script. It encodes letters, not meaning. This is the same relationship that the Latin alphabet has to English, French, and Spanish: one script, many languages. You could write French or Spanish in Circular Gallifreyan if you wanted to, because the system maps letters, not words.

Loren Sherman created Circular Gallifreyan in 2011. Sherman is a fan artist, not a BBC employee, and the system was developed independently of the show's production. According to the Wikipedia article on the Doctor Who franchise, the show first aired on November 23, 1963, created by Sydney Newman, C.E. Webber, and Donald Wilson, and produced by BBC Studios. The show has been on the air (with gaps) for over 60 years. At no point during those 60 years did the BBC publish a functional Gallifreyan writing system.

Sherman published the system on a personal site and in fan communities. The original guide, sometimes called the "Sherman guide" or the Circular Gallifreyan guide, lays out the letter mappings, the circle structure, and the rules for combining letters into words and words into sentences. Fan communities on Reddit (r/gallifreyan and r/doctorwho) and Tumblr spread the system through tutorials and translation challenges. Over time, Sherman's system became the standard not because anyone voted on it, but because it was the clearest, most complete, and most visually appealing option available.

The BBC has acknowledged fan Gallifreyan in loose ways. Prop designers have used circular graphics that resemble fan Gallifreyan on set, and official merchandise has occasionally borrowed the aesthetic. But the BBC has never endorsed Sherman's system as canonical, and Sherman retains no official credit on the show. This is a fan creation that outgrew its origin. You can see the full guide and the letter mappings on Loren Sherman's Circular Gallifreyan guide.

Circular Gallifreyan encodes each word as a circle. The circle has two main rings. Consonants go on the outer ring. Vowels go in the inner ring. The system uses four base shapes for consonants: a line, an arc, a box, and a dot. Each consonant is a modification of one of these shapes. The modifications include adding a second line, changing the curve direction, or adding dots inside or outside the shape.

The consonant mappings work like this. The base line shape covers several consonants depending on how many lines it has and where they point. A single line is one set of letters. A double line is another. The arc shape covers another set. The box shape covers another. Dots modify the base shape to pick a specific letter within each set. The full mapping is documented in Sherman's guide, and it takes about 20 minutes to memorize the consonant chart.

Vowels are simpler. There are five vowel shapes, one per vowel, and they sit inside the word circle. A vowel can be attached to a consonant or float on its own. The position and style of the vowel shape tells you which vowel it is. A circle with a dot in the center is one vowel. A circle with a line through it is another. The vowel system is the easiest part of Circular Gallifreyan to learn.

Words combine into sentences by linking the word circles together. Sentence circles contain multiple word circles arranged around a larger circle. Punctuation has its own set of shapes. A sentence in Circular Gallifreyan looks like a large wheel with smaller wheels inside it, which is exactly the aesthetic the show's prop designers were going for when they put circular graphics on Time Lord screens and walls.

The system has limitations. It works best for short texts. Long paragraphs become visually dense and hard to read because every word is a circle and every sentence is a larger circle containing word circles. Fans typically use Circular Gallifreyan for names, short phrases, tattoos, and decorative art rather than for long-form writing. This is a feature, not a bug. The system was designed to look good, not to replace the Latin alphabet for everyday use.

Let us walk through writing the word "TIME" in Circular Gallifreyan. You need something to draw circles with. A compass helps. A template with concentric circles also works.

Step one: draw a circle. This is your word circle. Everything goes inside it.

Step two: place the consonants on the outer ring. The word "TIME" has the consonants T and M. In Sherman's system, T is a specific modification of one of the base shapes, and M is a modification of another. You place T at the top of the outer ring and M at the bottom, spacing the consonants evenly around the circle. The exact shape for each consonant comes from the letter chart in Sherman's guide.

Step three: place the vowels in the inner ring. "TIME" has the vowels I and E. Each vowel is a distinct shape. You place I near the T (since T and I are adjacent in the word) and E near the M. The vowel shapes sit inside the word circle, between the center and the outer ring.

Step four: check your work. Read the circle from the top, going clockwise. You should be able to reconstruct T-I-M-E from the shapes you placed. If the shapes are correct and the reading order is right, you have written "TIME" in Circular Gallifreyan.

That is the whole process for a single word. Longer words have more consonants on the outer ring and more vowels in the inner ring. The circle gets more crowded, but the principle is the same. You can practice with our Gallifreyan Translator, which generates the circles for you so you can check your hand-drawn versions against the tool's output. For comparison, the Tengwar and Cirth translator handles Tolkien's Elvish scripts, which are also letter-based systems but use linear rather than circular layouts.

The BBC has never published an official, functional Gallifreyan writing system. What appears on screen in Doctor Who is decorative. The prop department creates circular graphics that look alien and Time Lord-ish, but these graphics do not encode any language. They are visual design elements, not a readable script.

This creates a gap between the show and the fan community. Fans wanted to actually write in Gallifreyan. The show would not or could not provide a system. Loren Sherman filled that gap. Circular Gallifreyan became the fan standard because it was the first complete, learnable, and visually convincing system available. Other fan systems exist, but Sherman's has the largest community and the most documentation.

The BBC's approach to fictional languages and scripts has been inconsistent across its properties. The show occasionally uses alien-looking text that fans have tried to decode, but no episode has confirmed a specific letter-to-symbol mapping. The BBC Doctor Who website covers the show's history, episodes, and characters, but does not include a Gallifreyan writing guide. Fan sites and Sherman's guide remain the primary references.

This is common in science fiction franchises. The Aurebesh translator covers a Star Wars script that started as background graphics and was later formalized into a real letter-substitution system by fans and then officially adopted. Circular Gallifreyan followed a similar path, except the BBC has not officially adopted it. The system remains fan-canonical, not show-canonical.

Doctor Who is in an unusual state as of August 2026. Ncuti Gatwa played the 15th Doctor from 2023 to 2025. His final episode aired in May 2025, and the character regenerated into Billie Piper. Russell T Davies, who returned as showrunner in 2023, exited the role in June 2026. The 2026 Christmas special was canceled. The show may not return to screens until 2028.

The Disney+ co-production deal, which began with Gatwa's first season, ended after 26 episodes. The BBC is now putting the show out to competitive tender, meaning other studios and platforms can bid to co-produce future seasons. The outcome of that process is not yet decided. An animated Doctor Who series is in production for CBeebies, the BBC's children's channel, but that is a separate project from the live-action series.

For the Gallifreyan fan community, the hiatus does not change much. Circular Gallifreyan does not depend on new episodes. The system is complete and documented. Fans continue to create art, tattoos, and translations regardless of whether the show is airing. The community has sustained itself through previous gaps in the show's broadcast history, including the 16-year gap between the 1996 TV movie and the 2005 revival. A two-year hiatus is manageable.

The bigger question is whether a future production team might officially formalize Gallifreyan, the way Star Wars eventually formalized Aurebesh. If the BBC or a new co-production partner decides to publish a canonical writing system, it would either adopt Sherman's system (giving it official status) or create a new one (splitting the community). Neither has happened yet. Until then, Circular Gallifreyan remains the standard, and Loren Sherman remains the person who built it.