How to play
- Tap a letter in the puzzle. Every copy of that code letter lights up.
- Type your guess, or tap it on the keyboard. It fills in everywhere that code letter appears.
- Keep going until the sentence reads correctly. The game notices as soon as every letter is right.
Stuck? Reveal letter fills in the selected letter, and Check tells you how many of your guesses are wrong and marks them in red. Each one counts as a hint. The daily puzzle starts with its most common letter filled in. In practice you can choose Easy with three letters given, Normal with one, or Hard with none.
How to solve a cryptogram
Good solvers start with what stands out, not with the first letter.
- One-letter words: these are almost always A or I.
- Two-letter words: common ones are OF, TO, IN, IT, IS, BE, AS, AT, SO, WE, HE, BY, OR, ON, DO, IF, ME, MY, UP, AN, GO, NO and US.
- Three-letter words: THE and AND are the most common. A three-letter word that keeps turning up is a good bet for THE.
- Double letters: LL, EE, SS, OO and TT are the most common pairs.
- Letter frequency: E, T, A, O, I and N are the most common letters in English, so look at which code letters appear most often. This works best in longer puzzles.
- Word endings: look for patterns like -ING, -ED, -LY and -TION.
Once you have a few letters, fill them in and look for words with one or two gaps. Each new letter helps with the next word.
Where cryptograms come from
Cryptograms are a puzzle form of the simple substitution cipher, which has been used to hide messages for over two thousand years. They became popular as a pastime in the 19th century: Edgar Allan Poe challenged readers to send him ciphers to solve, and his 1843 story The Gold-Bug has a hero who cracks one by counting letters. The American Cryptogram Association was founded in 1930 for fans of the hobby, and many newspapers still print one every day.
The puzzles here use traditional proverbs. To explore other ciphers, try the Caesar cipher decoder, the Atbash cipher or the Vigenère cipher.