Ubbi Dubbi is a spoken language game made famous by the PBS children’s series Zoom in the 1970s. The rule is delightfully simple: before every vowel sound you insert the syllable ub, turning ordinary speech into a fast, bubbly secret code. This tool both encodes plain text into Ubbi Dubbi and decodes it back.
How it works
Encoding scans the text letter by letter. Whenever it reaches a vowel (a, e, i, o, u), it inserts ub immediately before that vowel. Consonants, spaces and punctuation are left untouched.
Decoding reverses this by removing each ub that sits directly in front of a vowel. Because the encoder only ever inserts ub+vowel, the decoder can safely strip those pairs and leave any naturally occurring ub (like in a word that already had no following vowel) in place. Capitalisation is carried onto the inserted syllable so the output reads naturally.
Example by example
| Original | Step-by-step | Ubbi Dubbi |
|---|---|---|
| hi | ub before i | hubi |
| hello | ub before e, ub before o | hubellubo |
| speak | ub before e, ub before a | spubeubak |
| cat | ub before a | cubat |
| street | ub before e, ub before e | strubeubeet |
Say hubellubo out loud quickly and the rhythm is unmistakable — that slightly singy, bouncy cadence is exactly what made Ubbi Dubbi recognisable on the playground.
The history of Zoom and language games
Zoom was a PBS children’s variety show that aired from 1972 to 1978 (and was revived from 1999 to 2005). The original cast taught viewers Ubbi Dubbi as an interactive segment, and letters from kids speaking it flooded the producers — evidence that the transformation rule was simple enough for children to internalise quickly and fast enough when spoken to sound genuinely unintelligible to outsiders.
Ubbi Dubbi belongs to the same family as Pig Latin and Pig Greek: systematic phonological games where a fixed rule is applied to every word. The appeal is that anyone who knows the rule can participate, and the barrier for outsiders is high enough to make it feel like a real code. Unlike Pig Latin, which moves or adds syllables relative to the initial consonant cluster, Ubbi Dubbi applies identically to every vowel regardless of position, making it slightly easier to learn but surprisingly hard to follow at speed.
Tips for using the tool
- Decode mode is useful for checking that a piece of Ubbi Dubbi text was encoded correctly, or for deciphering something a friend sent.
- Consecutive vowels (as in eat, out, aisle) each receive their own
ub— the output can look unusual on the page but sounds correct when spoken. - Proper nouns encode the same as common words. Emily becomes Ubemubiluby, and Apple becomes Ubapplube (with capitalisation preserved on the first
Ub). - Because the tool works on letters rather than phonemes, it follows the written-vowel rule rather than the spoken-vowel rule. Words like knight (where the silent e is still there) or year (where y acts as a vowel in speech) encode by letter, which is consistent with how most players apply the game.