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Rubik’s Cube Notation

To describe a rotation on the cube we use letters. Learn to read the Rubik’s Cube Notation and you’ll be able to perform all the algorithms you see in the solution tutorials. The good news is that learning only six intuitive letters is sufficient to solve the cube but if you are a speedcuber you should learn the advanced notation which you can access from this page.

The Basics

A single letter by itself means to turn that face clockwise 90 degrees.
A letter followed by an apostrophe means to turn that face counterclockwise 90 degrees.
A letter with the number 2 after it means to turn that face 180 degrees.
e.g. R U R’ U R U2 R’ U

There is another commonly used notation where the uppercase mean a clockwise and the lowercase means counterclockwise turns, but this is not the official version because for the other twisty puzzles the lowercase letter means a different thing.
e.g. R U r U R U2 r U

Sometimes they mark the inverse rotations with the capital face initial followed by a lowercase i
e.g. Fi means front inverted.

For the beginner's method you just have to know the simple F (front), B (back), R (right), L (left), D (down), U (up) turns but there are more complicated moves for speedcubers which manipulate the middle layer or two layers at the same time or reorient the whole cube.

The widget below features a 3D cube to demonstrate the Singmaster notation, but unfortunately this is not yet supported in all browsers. If your computer can’t render this HTML5 Rubik’s Cube properly please see the one in the box below.

Click on the buttons to see what the rotations mean: