How to Solve a Cryptogram, Step by Step

Written and checked by hand. Last reviewed July 25, 2026.

A cryptogram is a quotation with its alphabet shuffled. Every A in the original might have become a K, every T a P, and so on all the way through. Nothing is hidden except the substitution, and the substitution never changes inside a puzzle. That single fact is what makes it solvable with a pencil, and it is what the whole method below is built on.

1. Where to start: the shortest words

Do not start at the beginning. Start at the shortest word on the page, because short words have the fewest possible answers.

A one-letter word in English is almost always A or I. There is no third serious candidate in ordinary prose. So the moment you see a lone cipher letter standing by itself, you have narrowed twenty-six possibilities down to two, and you can usually settle it from context: I tends to open a clause, A tends to sit in front of a noun.

Two-letter words are the next best thing. The whole practical list is short: OF, TO, IN, IS, IT, AS, AT, BE, BY, HE, WE, DO, GO, IF, ME, MY, NO, ON, OR, SO, UP, US, AN, AM. Notice how many of them contain O. Notice also that only a handful start with a vowel. If a two-letter word repeats three times in a quotation, it is very likely OF, TO or IN.

Three-letter words are dominated by THE, AND, YOU, FOR, NOT, BUT, ARE, ALL, ONE, HIS, HAS, WAS, CAN, OUT, WHO, ITS, NOW, HOW. In a quotation of ordinary length, THE and AND together usually account for more three-letter words than everything else combined.

Which short words actually turn up

Those lists are the standard ones. We also measured the real thing: the short words that occur most often across the 81 quotations we have published are on the letter frequency chart, alongside a frequency count taken from the same set rather than from a textbook.

2. Apostrophes, the biggest giveaway in the puzzle

Punctuation is never enciphered. That means every apostrophe on the page is a free clue, and it is usually the most valuable one available.

Look at what follows the apostrophe:

One letter after it — that letter is S in the overwhelming majority of cases (world's, man's, it's). Occasionally it is T, as in don't, but then the apostrophe sits between N and T.
Two letters after it — RE, VE, LL or ND (they're, we've, we'll, and in dialect). RE and VE are the common ones.
N apostrophe T — you have just found N and T at once, and with them the whole family of don't, isn't, can't, won't.

One apostrophe often unlocks three letters. Always take it first.

3. Counting letters, and what the count is really telling you

The classic advice is to count how often each cipher letter appears and match the counts against the frequency of letters in English: E first, then T, A, O, I, N, S, R, H. That advice is sound, but it is routinely misapplied, so here is the honest version.

Frequency order is reliable in a book. In a single quotation of fifty or sixty letters it is noisy. A quotation about happiness will be full of H and P; one about the sea will be full of S. What survives the noise is not the exact order but the top of it: the most common letter in a quotation is E far more often than it is anything else, and the top four or five cipher letters will nearly always be drawn from E, T, A, O, I, N.

So use the count as a shortlist, not as an answer. If one cipher letter is well ahead of the field, pencil in E and see whether the rest of the puzzle agrees. If three letters are tied, the count has told you they are common letters and nothing more; go back to the short words.

There is a second, quieter use for the count. A letter that appears once in a long quotation is probably one of the rare ones: J, Q, X, Z, K, V. That is worth knowing when you are down to the last two or three cells.

4. Finding THE

THE is the single most common word in English, and it has a shape you can see from across the room: three letters, ending in whichever cipher letter you already suspect is E, and usually appearing more than once.

Cracking THE gives you T, H and E in one move, and those three letters seed a great deal else: E ends an enormous number of words, T starts an enormous number, and TH is the most common pair of letters in the language. Once you have THE, scan for THAT, THIS, THEN, THERE, WITH and OTHER, all of which are now half-filled in.

The same trick works on AND, which is the other three-letter word that repeats. If you have two different repeating three-letter words, they are THE and AND far more often than not.

5. Doubled letters

A pair of identical cipher letters side by side is a strong clue, because English only doubles some letters. In practice the doubles you meet are, roughly in order: LL, OO, SS, EE, TT, NN, FF, RR — measured across the quotations we publish.

Position matters as much as identity:

A double at the end of a short word: LL (all, will, tell, still), SS (less, class), EE (see, free), OO (too).
A double in the middle of a longer word: often LL, SS, TT, PP, RR, MM, NN.
A doubled letter is never J, K, Q, V, W, X or Y in ordinary English words. That eliminates seven candidates before you start.

6. Beginnings and endings

English words are extremely predictable at the edges. If you know a word's last two or three letters, you often know the word.

-ING is the most productive ending in the language. Three letters at the end of a longer word, where the middle letter is one you have already pencilled as N, is worth testing immediately.
-ED ends most past tenses; -LY most adverbs; -TION a great many nouns, and it is a gift because it hands you four letters.
-S at the end of a word you already half-know is usually a plural, and it confirms S everywhere else on the page.
At the front, TH-, WH-, SH-, CH-, ST-, RE-, UN-, CON- cover a great deal of ordinary prose.

The most common three-letter sequences in our own published quotations are: THE, YOU, AND, ING, NOT, HAT, EVE, OUR, THI, THA. The most common two-letter sequences are: TH, HE, AN, IN, ER, RE, OU, IS, TO, AT, EA, ES. Learn the top handful and you will start recognising them as shapes rather than working them out.

7. Guess, then test

This is the habit that matters, and it is the one beginners skip.

A guess is not a commitment. When you pencil in a letter, immediately write that same letter into every cell with the same cipher letter, everywhere in the puzzle, and then read the results. You are not looking for confirmation. You are looking for an impossibility: a word with no vowel, a letter used twice for two different things, a three-letter word that cannot exist.

An impossibility is good news. It costs you thirty seconds and eliminates a branch. The slow way to solve a cryptogram is to make a guess, leave it in one word, and continue.

Two rules the setter guarantees

One cipher letter always stands for exactly one plain letter, and no letter ever stands for itself. The second rule is worth money: if you are wondering whether the cipher letter R might be plain R, in our puzzles it cannot be. The full set of guarantees is on the cryptogram rules page.

8. A full worked example

Here is a real puzzle, set with the same engine that sets the daily one. Work along if you like; every step below is the reasoning, not just the answer.

OJJMNZCUVJL'DODMOHZ,OQLOJJMNZAZQOQLCUAZQAZVZJPSJOPZVD.

Step one: the lone letter

The fourth word is a single letter, O. So O is A or I. Hold that thought.

Step two: the apostrophe

The third word is CUVJL'D. One letter follows the apostrophe, so that letter, D, is almost certainly S. Write S in.

Step three: count

The six most common cipher letters in this puzzle:

How often each cipher letter appears in the example.
Cipher letter	Times
Z	8
O	7
J	7
Q	4
M	3
V	3

Z is at the top, so try E there.

Step four: THE

Now look at the second word: MNZ. Three letters, ending in the letter you just called E, and it appears twice in the quotation. That is THE. You now have M = T and N = H as well.

Step five: the doubled word

The first word is OJJ: three letters, the last two identical, and it also appears twice. A three-letter word with a doubled ending is a very short list — ALL, ADD, EGG, ODD, INN, TOO, SEE, OFF. The first letter is O, which you already suspected was A or I. ALL fits, and it settles O as A and J as L.

Step six: the other repeated three

OQL appears twice, starts with the letter you have just fixed as A, and is three letters long. AND. That gives you N and D, and from there the rest falls over quickly: AZQ is MEN, DMOHZ has four of its five letters filled, and SJOPZVD is now almost readable.

Show the solved quotation

“ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, AND ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN MERELY PLAYERS.”

— William Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599)

Six steps, and not one of them required a dictionary. The order is the point: shortest words first, then punctuation, then counts, then the words that repeat.

9. When you are genuinely stuck

Everyone hits a wall, usually about two-thirds of the way through, and usually because one early guess was wrong and has been quietly poisoning everything since.

Reread what you have written, out loud if you can. Half-solved words often resolve the moment you hear them. Your ear knows more English than your eye does.
Find the longest word and stare at its pattern. Long words have very few matches. A word of nine letters where the second and seventh are the same is a much narrower search than it looks.
Check your vowels. Every English word has one. If a word in your grid has no vowel in it yet, one of its letters is a vowel you have not placed. Roughly two letters in five are vowels, so if you have placed only one vowel in a long quotation, something is wrong.
Suspect your earliest guess, not your latest. The wrong letter is almost always one you have stopped questioning. Rub out the first thing you wrote and see what happens.
Walk away for ten minutes. This is not a joke and it is not filler. Substitution puzzles are pattern-matching, and pattern-matching degrades when you have been staring at the same wrong shape for a while.

If you would rather have the machine do the search, that is a legitimate way to learn too. The cryptogram solver works entirely in your browser and will show you the substitution it found, which is often more instructive than the answer itself.

10. Five mistakes that cost beginners the most time

Writing in pen. Every experienced solver works in pencil, and it is not squeamishness. You will change your mind four or five times in a normal puzzle, and a grid you cannot rub out becomes unreadable.
Filling in one word at a time. A letter you place belongs to the whole puzzle, not the word you found it in. Propagate it everywhere immediately.
Starting at the first word. The first word is only the easiest word if you are lucky. Start with the shortest.
Trusting the frequency table too far. It is a shortlist, not an oracle. See section 3.
Assuming a letter can stand for itself. In our puzzles it never does. In some newspaper puzzles it can. Know which one you are holding.

Practise on a real one

There is a new cryptogram here every morning, in type large enough to read comfortably, with the answer and the source of the quotation on the same page. Every past puzzle stays up permanently, so you can work backwards through the archive at whatever pace suits you.

Questions we get

Do I need to know any maths?

No. A cryptogram is a reading puzzle, not an arithmetic one. Everything you need is pattern recognition: which letters repeat, where the short words are, and what English words could fit the shape in front of you.

How long should a cryptogram take?

A first one can take half an hour. After a couple of weeks of daily practice most people land between four and ten minutes for an ordinary quotation. Speed comes from recognising word shapes on sight, and that only comes from repetition.

Is guessing cheating?

Guessing is the method. The discipline is not avoiding guesses, it is testing them. Write a guess in lightly, push it through the whole puzzle, and if it produces an impossible word anywhere, take it out again.

What if two letters look equally likely?

Try the one that appears in the most other words. A wrong guess that touches six words is exposed in seconds; a wrong guess that touches one word can sit there undetected for ten minutes.

Are the puzzles here the same as the ones in my newspaper?

No. Newspaper Cryptoquote and Cryptoquip puzzles are syndicated features and belong to their publishers. The puzzles on this site are set by us, from quotations in the public domain, and we publish our own answers.