Free Games How to play Cryptogram
A cryptogram is one of the oldest kinds of word puzzle: a sentence, usually a proverb or a familiar saying, has had every letter swapped for a different one. The swap is consistent throughout the whole sentence, so if the letter A has become the letter Q, then every A in the saying, and only the A's, will appear as a Q. Your task is to work backwards from the coded letters to the real ones, and watch the saying come into focus underneath.
- Tap any coded letter and every copy of it, wherever it appears in the saying, is selected at once.
- Tap a letter on the pad below and that becomes your guess for the selected coded letter, filling in all of its copies together.
- Changed your mind? Tap the same coded letter again and choose differently, or press Undo to clear just that one letter and leave the rest of your work in place.
- When every coded letter has been correctly matched to its real letter, the puzzle solves itself and shows you the finished saying.
There is no fixed order you must go in. Some people start with short words, since a three-letter word coded as a common shape is often "the" or "and." Others start with the letter that appears most often in the puzzle, since it is likely to be one of English's most frequent letters.
What a beginner usually gets wrong
The most common early mistake is guessing at random rather than looking for patterns. A cryptogram rewards noticing repetition: if one coded letter appears far more often than any other, it is worth testing first, because in ordinary English writing the letters E, T and A appear the most, by a wide margin, while letters like Q, X and Z are rare. A single letter standing entirely on its own, with a space on both sides, is almost always "A" or "I," since those are the only two single-letter words in common use. Look, too, at short words: a coded three-letter word that turns up again and again is a strong candidate for "the," and a coded word ending the same way twice in a row often ends in "-ING" or "-ED."
The second mistake is forgetting that a wrong guess is not a setback, it is information. If filling in a letter makes a word look impossible, that is exactly the moment to try something else. Nothing here is scored against you for changing your mind, so there is no reason to hesitate over a guess.
What makes this version comfortable to use
Working out a substitution cipher on paper usually means writing small guesses in pencil above dozens of tiny letters, then crossing them out and starting again. Here, every coded letter is a large button, and your guess for it appears underneath in its own line, in a contrasting color once every copy of that letter agrees with the real answer. Selecting a letter fills in every one of its copies at the same moment, so you are never hunting the page for a stray instance you missed. The "letters not yet used" line keeps track of which of the twenty-six letters you have not yet placed anywhere, which narrows things down as the puzzle goes on. And the Hint button does not simply hand you the answer: it names the coded letter it picked, says how many times that letter appears in this particular puzzle, and explains, when it applies, that the letter it stands for is one of the handful that dominate ordinary English writing. That reasoning is the same logic a person solving one of these by hand would use, just spelled out plainly.
Every saying in the collection is a traditional proverb, the kind that has been passed down for generations rather than written recently by any one person, so there is nothing to recognize from a film or a song, just old, familiar wisdom waiting to be uncovered one letter at a time.
If you enjoy this, you may also like our Word Scramble and our Hangman, or browse all of our word games and the full collection of free games.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a cryptogram?
- A cryptogram takes a sentence, usually a well known saying, and swaps every letter for a different one, always the same swap throughout. So if A becomes Q once, it becomes Q everywhere it appears. Your job is to work out the swap and read the saying underneath.
- How do I play?
- Tap any coded letter and every copy of it lights up at once. Then tap the letter on the pad below that you think it really stands for, and all of those copies fill in together. Keep going, letter by letter, until the whole saying reads correctly.
- What if I guess a letter wrong?
- Nothing is lost. Tap the coded letter again and choose a different one, or press Undo to clear just that letter. There is no penalty and no limit on changing your mind.
- How does the Hint button work?
- Hint fills in one letter for you and explains why it was a good guess, usually because that coded letter appears more often than any other you have not solved, and common English letters like E, T and A naturally turn up the most in any sentence. Press it as often as you like, at no cost.
- Is there a timer or a score?
- No. There is no clock, no score kept between puzzles and nothing recorded. Solve the saying at whatever pace suits you, and press New puzzle whenever you would like a fresh one.
Where Cryptogram came from
A cryptogram is a message written with a simple substitution cipher, one letter standing in for another throughout, and puzzles built this way are far older than the newspaper page. Julius Caesar is recorded as having used a substitution cipher in his private letters, and letter-for-letter codes turn up again and again across the centuries wherever someone wanted a message only the intended reader could work out.
Their life as a puzzle for its own sake owes a great deal to Edgar Allan Poe. Before he wrote his story The Gold-Bug, which turns on a cipher of this kind, Poe challenged readers of a Philadelphia newspaper to send him substitution ciphers, and claimed to solve nearly every one himself. The version here works the same way those did: one letter always stands for the same other letter, and the quotation gives itself away one substitution at a time.
