How long should a cryptogram take?

A gentle one with six letters given goes in two or three minutes once you know the openings. An expert one with nothing given is realistically five to fifteen, and the first two letters take most of it.

Is guessing ever necessary in a cryptogram?

Not blindly. Every guess is testable: put a letter in, read the words it touches, and an impossible spelling appears within a word or two if it was wrong. That is trial with immediate feedback, not guessing.

Do I need to know the saying to solve it?

No, and recognising it would rather spoil the exercise. The sayings here are deliberately original and unattributed, so the only route in is the cipher itself.

Why do none of the sayings contain an apostrophe?

Because an apostrophe sits right beside a cipher letter and half of all solvers read it as punctuation belonging to the plain text, which it is not. Writing 'do not' instead of the contraction removes an ambiguity that has nothing to do with the puzzle.

How to Solve Cryptograms

Work from the short words outward. A one-letter word is A or I; a three-letter word is usually THE; a doubled pair is usually LL, SS, EE, OO or TT. Place those, read what the rest of the sentence now has to be, and use letter counts only to decide which symbol to attack next. No letter ever stands for itself, which rules out one candidate everywhere.

The rules, step by step

1Read the cipher, not the wordsThe sentence has had every letter replaced by a different one. What you see is the encrypted text; the saying underneath is what you are trying to recover.
2One symbol means one letterThe substitution is consistent throughout and it works both ways: a symbol always means the same letter, and a letter is always written as the same symbol.
3No letter stands for itselfThe key is always a derangement, so a symbol never means the letter it is printed as. That rules out one candidate for every symbol before you start.
4Spaces and punctuation are unchangedWord breaks, commas and the full stop are exactly where they were in the saying. Word lengths and word shapes are therefore real evidence, not decoration.
5Choose a symbol, then type a letterClick or tap any symbol to select it, then press a letter. Every occurrence of that symbol in the whole puzzle changes at once, because you are editing the key rather than one square.
6Solve it when the sentence readsYou have finished when every symbol carries its real letter and the text reads as plain English. Given letters are shown in gold and cannot be changed.

Try it — the rules above, running

Time0:00SymbolDFilled3/13Puzzle#20260914

New puzzle enciphers a fresh saying at the level you last chose, Hint fills in the symbol that appears most often and is still blank or wrong, and the menu at the end of the bar holds the letter-frequency counts, check-as-you-go, clear-my-letters, today’s shared puzzle and the level.

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This level

Three symbols given, any saying in the corpus. This is the newspaper setting: enough of a foothold to get the first word, and nothing after that. Expect 12 to 20 different symbols over 22 to 42 letters.

Keyboard

A – Z: Assign that letter to the selected symbol
Backspace: Clear the selected symbol
← →: Move to the previous or next letter
↑ ↓: Jump back or forward a whole word

Where do you start a cryptogram?

1Find the shortest wordA one-letter word is A or I and nothing else. In a proverb it is A essentially always, so write it in and see where else that symbol lands.
2Try THE on a three-letter wordEspecially one that appears more than once, or one that sits immediately before a long word. Placing THE gives you three of the six most common letters in English at a stroke.
3Look for a doubled pairTwo identical symbols side by side are almost always LL, SS, EE, OO or TT. Which one is usually settled by the letters already around it.
4Check the endingsScan the last two or three symbols of every long word for a repeated group. -ING, -ED, -ES and -LY cover a great deal of English, and -ING pays three letters for one deduction.
5Read the sentence aloud in your headHalf-filled words are the real engine. T_E _OAD is THE ROAD long before you have counted anything, and each letter you place makes the next word more constrained.

Which words give the most away?

One letter — A, or I. Two possibilities, and in a proverb one of them barely occurs.
Two letters — OF, TO, IN, IS, IT, AS, AT, ON, BY, BE. Ten words cover nearly all of them, and they share very few letters between them.
Three letters — THE first, then AND, YOU, ARE, NOT, ALL, ONE. THE is more common in written English than the next three combined.
A word repeated in the same sentence — short and repeated means THE or A almost every time; long and repeated is a gift, because the saying is making a point out of it.
A word with a doubled pair inside it — the doubled letter plus the word's length usually narrows it to a handful of candidates.

How do you use letter frequency without being misled?

Treat it as a ranking of which symbol to think about, never as an answer. Over a lot of English the order is E T A O I N S H R D L U, but a cryptogram is one sentence of thirty-odd letters, and at that size the expected count for E is about four. Seeing a symbol five times tells you it is probably a vowel or T; it does not tell you which.

The counts are far more useful negatively. A symbol that appears once is very unlikely to be E, T or A, so do not spend a guess on it — and a symbol that appears once next to a symbol you have already read as Q is doing something specific. The letter-frequency panel on the board shows the counts for the puzzle in front of you alongside the English averages, so the gap between the two is visible rather than assumed.

What do you do when you get stuck?

1Look for a contradiction you have already madeIf two symbols are flagged, one is wrong by the rules of the cipher. Clearing the newer of the two is right more often than not.
2Remember that no letter is itselfIf a symbol is printed as R, it is not R. On a stubborn symbol that eliminates the one candidate that keeps tempting you.
3Clear a guess you were never sure aboutA single wrong letter poisons every word it touches, and it is usually the earliest hunch rather than the most recent one that has to go.
4Take one hint and keep goingThe hint fills in the busiest unsolved symbol and says why. One symbol appearing six times rewrites six squares, and that is usually enough to restart the chain.

How do you win more often?

Take the one-letter words firstEnglish has only two one-letter words, A and I, and in this corpus of proverbs it is always A — thirty-two of the seventy-six sayings contain one. That is a free letter with no counting required, and A is the third most common letter in the language, so it appears elsewhere too.
Assume a three-letter word is THE until it refusesTHE is far and away the most common three-letter word in written English, and it buys you T, H and E in one move. If the sentence then produces an impossible spelling somewhere else, back it out and try AND — but try THE first, because it is right most of the time.
Read the shape of the long words, not their lettersA word's pattern of repeats survives encryption exactly: SEES and TOOT are both ABBA, and a six-letter word whose second and last letters match is a small family. Long words are the most constrained things on the board, which makes them the easiest to attack once you have three or four letters placed.
Use the clash flag as a proof, not a nuisanceWhen two symbols turn red they are claiming the same letter, and a substitution cipher cannot do that — so one of them is definitely wrong. Clear the more recent guess rather than the older one; the older guess usually came from a word deduction and the newer one from a hunch.
Count the symbols, then stop countingFrequency is a shortlist and nothing more on a 33-letter sentence, where E is only expected about four times and a two-occurrence swing is normal. Use the counts to pick which symbol to attack first, then settle it against an actual word rather than against the table.
Look at the last three letters of every long wordEnglish endings are few and heavily reused: -ING, -ED, -ES, -LY, -ER, -EST. A seven-letter word whose final three symbols also appear together at the end of another word is almost certainly carrying one of those, and -ING alone gives you three letters at once.

Common questions about cryptogram

How long should a cryptogram take?: A gentle one with six letters given goes in two or three minutes once you know the openings. An expert one with nothing given is realistically five to fifteen, and the first two letters take most of it.
Is guessing ever necessary in a cryptogram?: Not blindly. Every guess is testable: put a letter in, read the words it touches, and an impossible spelling appears within a word or two if it was wrong. That is trial with immediate feedback, not guessing.
Do I need to know the saying to solve it?: No, and recognising it would rather spoil the exercise. The sayings here are deliberately original and unattributed, so the only route in is the cipher itself.
Why do none of the sayings contain an apostrophe?: Because an apostrophe sits right beside a cipher letter and half of all solvers read it as punctuation belonging to the plain text, which it is not. Writing 'do not' instead of the contraction removes an ambiguity that has nothing to do with the puzzle.

Ready to stop reading? Play cryptogram on the full board, with controls and statistics tailored to that game.