Cryptogram Cheat Sheet: The Letter Frequency Chart

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

Everything a cryptogram solver needs to look up, on one page: how often each letter appears, which short words turn up most, which letters double, and which pairs and triples run together. Two of the tables below are measured from the quotations we actually publish rather than copied from a textbook, so they describe the puzzles you will be solving here.

Letter frequency in general English

This is the standard table, and it is the one to memorise if you are memorising anything. The first six letters — E T A O I N — account for roughly half of all letters in ordinary English text.

Letter frequency in general English text. Source: Robert Lewand, Cryptological Mathematics (2000).
Rank	Letter	Share
1	E	12.02%
2	T	9.10%
3	A	8.12%
4	O	7.68%
5	I	7.31%
6	N	6.95%
7	S	6.28%
8	R	6.02%
9	H	5.92%
10	D	4.32%
11	L	3.98%
12	U	2.88%
13	C	2.71%
14	M	2.61%
15	F	2.30%
16	Y	2.11%
17	W	2.09%
18	G	2.03%
19	P	1.82%
20	B	1.49%
21	V	1.11%
22	K	0.69%
23	X	0.17%
24	Q	0.11%
25	J	0.10%
26	Z	0.07%

Letter frequency in the quotations we publish

Textbook frequencies are drawn from running prose: novels, newspapers, transcripts. A quotation is not running prose. It is short, deliberately shaped, and often reaches for slightly grander vocabulary than a news report. That shifts the counts, and since these are the puzzles in front of you, the shift is worth knowing.

Letter frequency measured across the 81 quotations we publish, 4,607 letters in all. The fourth column shows how many places each letter moves compared with its rank in general English.
Rank	Letter	Share	Rank shift
1	E	12.96%	—
2	T	10.42%	—
3	O	8.38%	+1
4	A	8.01%	-1
5	S	6.82%	+2
6	I	6.75%	-1
7	N	6.71%	-1
8	H	5.75%	+1
9	R	5.45%	-1
10	L	3.58%	+1
11	D	3.26%	-1
12	U	2.89%	—
13	M	2.73%	+1
14	F	2.50%	+1
15	W	2.45%	+2
16	Y	2.19%	—
17	G	2.15%	+1
18	C	1.67%	-5
19	B	1.67%	+1
20	P	1.56%	-1
21	V	1.02%	—
22	K	0.72%	—
23	X	0.17%	—
24	Q	0.11%	—
25	J	0.07%	—
26	Z	0.02%	—

The fourth column is the interesting one. Where a letter moves several places up or down compared with general English, that is the aphoristic register showing through — the vocabulary of maxims and epigrams rather than of reportage.

The short words that actually appear

Short words are where a cryptogram opens. One-letter words are A or I and nothing else. Two-letter words come from a list of about two dozen. Three-letter words are dominated by THE and AND. Here is what actually turns up, in order of frequency, across our published quotations:

The short words that actually turn up most often in our published quotations, most frequent first.
One letter	A, I
Two letters	TO, OF, IS, IN, IT, BE, DO, WE, BY, HE
Three letters	THE, AND, YOU, NOT, ARE, BUT, MAN, CAN, FOR, WHO
Four letters	THAT, WITH, YOUR, BEST, SOME, LIFE, TIME, GOOD

The standard lists worth keeping in your head, in rough order:

Two letters: OF, TO, IN, IS, IT, AS, AT, BE, BY, HE, WE, DO, GO, IF, ME, MY, NO, ON, OR, SO, UP, US, AN, AM.
Three letters: THE, AND, YOU, FOR, NOT, BUT, ARE, ALL, ONE, HIS, HAS, WAS, CAN, OUT, WHO, ITS, NOW, HOW, MAN, NEW, OLD, TWO, WAY.
Four letters: THAT, WITH, HAVE, THIS, FROM, THEY, BEEN, MORE, WHEN, WILL, EACH, LIFE, ONLY, THAN, THEM, WELL, MOST, MAKE, TIME, GOOD.

Doubled letters

A doubled letter narrows the field sharply, because English only doubles some letters and never doubles others. Across our published quotations the doubles that occur, most common first, are:

LL, OO, SS, EE, TT, NN, FF, RR

Two rules that eliminate more candidates than any table can:

English words essentially never double J, K, Q, V, W, X or Y. Seven letters gone at a stroke.
A doubled letter at the end of a short word is overwhelmingly LL (all, will, tell, still, small) or SS (less, class, press), with EE and OO next.

Pairs and triples

Letters travel in company. Recognising the common sequences as shapes, rather than deducing them letter by letter, is most of what separates a four-minute solve from a twenty-minute one.

Most common two-letter sequences in our quotations: TH, HE, AN, IN, ER, RE, OU, IS, TO, AT, EA, ES.

Most common three-letter sequences: THE, YOU, AND, ING, NOT, HAT, EVE, OUR, THI, THA.

TH deserves special mention: it is the most common letter pair in English by a wide margin, and THE is the most common word. If you find a repeated two-letter sequence that also opens a repeated three-letter word, you have almost certainly found T and H, and E follows immediately.

Word endings and beginnings

The suffixes and prefixes worth testing first, and what each one gives you.
Pattern	Where	What it hands you
-ING	End of a longer word	Three letters, including N and G
-ED	End of a past tense	E and D, and E is the letter you most want
-LY	End of an adverb	L and Y, both otherwise awkward to place
-TION	End of many nouns	Four letters at once, the best single payoff
-NESS	End of abstract nouns	N, E and a doubled S
-S	End of plurals and verbs	Confirms S across the whole puzzle
TH-, WH-, SH-, CH-	Start of a word	H, plus a strong hint at the vowel following
UN-, RE-, CON-, DIS-	Start of a longer word	Two or three letters and a likely word class

Apostrophes

The single most valuable mark on the page, because punctuation is never enciphered.

Apostrophe then one letter: S, nearly always. Possessive or contraction.
Apostrophe then two letters: RE, VE or LL.
Letter, apostrophe, T: the preceding letter is N, and you have found don't, isn't, can't, won't and their whole family.

A blank A to Z grid

Working solvers keep a running list of which plain letters are still unused. Twenty-six boxes, crossed off as you commit each one, is the cheapest error-catching device there is: if you find yourself about to assign a letter you have already used somewhere else, the grid catches it before the puzzle does.

Cross off each plain letter as you commit it. If two cipher letters want the same plain letter, one of them is wrong.
A–M	A B C D E F G H I J K L M
N–Z	N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

How to use this page

Print it once and keep it with the puzzles: it is laid out to print black on white on US Letter paper with the navigation stripped out. Then read the step-by-step method, which shows the order to apply all of this in, with a full worked example. The tables tell you what is likely; the method tells you what to do first.

Questions we get

Should I memorise the frequency order?

Memorise the first six, ETAOIN, and stop there. Beyond that the ordering is unstable in short texts and you will get more from knowing the common short words.

Why does your chart differ from the one in my puzzle book?

Because frequency depends entirely on what was counted. Textbook tables usually count running prose from a large corpus. Our second table counts the quotations we actually publish, which are short, aphoristic and slightly unusual in their letter mix. Both are correct about different things.

Does frequency analysis work on short puzzles?

Partly. In a fifty-letter quotation the counts are noisy and only the top of the order is meaningful. Use it as a shortlist, then let short words and apostrophes do the real work.

What about letter frequency by position?

Position matters more than most solvers realise. The letters that start words and the letters that end words are drawn from noticeably different distributions, which is why the first and last letter tables below are worth as much as the overall count.

Can I print this page?

Yes. It is laid out to print on US Letter paper in black on white, without the navigation. Print it once and keep it in the puzzle book.