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. So speak (s-p-e-a-k) becomes spubeubak — ub is placed before the e and again before the a. 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
The word hello (h-e-l-l-o) gains ub before the e and before the o, giving hubellubo. The greeting hi becomes hubi. Decoding hubellubo removes both ub syllables to restore hello.