Cryptoquote vs cryptogram: what's actually different?
If you have solved these puzzles for any length of time you have seen all three words — cryptogram, cryptoquote, Cryptoquip — used as if they were interchangeable, and you have probably assumed that somewhere there is a rule you never learned. There is, and it is smaller than you think. Two of the three words describe a kind of puzzle. The third is the name of a product.
The short answer
A cryptogram is any text hidden behind a letter-substitution cipher. A cryptoquote is a cryptogram whose hidden text is a quotation, normally with the speaker named underneath. A Cryptoquip is a specific daily puzzle distributed by King Features Syndicate, in which the hidden text is a pun rather than a quotation.
So: every cryptoquote is a cryptogram. Every Cryptoquip is a cryptogram. A cryptogram is not necessarily either. And the mechanics — the cipher, the deduction, the way you actually get from a wall of symbols to a readable sentence — are identical across all three.
Cryptogram — the umbrella term
Cryptogram is the general noun, and it carries no promise about what is hidden. The text can be a quotation, a proverb, a joke, a riddle, a line of a poem, or a sentence somebody wrote specifically to be enciphered. What makes it a cryptogram is the cipher, not the content: one letter of the alphabet consistently replaced by one other letter, number or symbol, everywhere it occurs, with the word spacing and punctuation left alone. If you want that mechanism explained properly, it is on what is a cryptogram.
Everything below is a cryptogram. The rest of this page is about the labels people put on top.
Cryptoquote — a cryptogram of a quotation
A cryptoquote adds exactly one editorial constraint: the hidden text must be something somebody actually said or wrote, and you are told who. That constraint is not decoration. It changes how the puzzle is solved, because it hands you a prior — a Voltaire line and a Groucho Marx line do not draw on the same vocabulary, and knowing which you are looking at narrows the candidate words before you have decoded any of them.
The word is now largely generic. It is used by newspapers, puzzle books and apps to mean "a cryptogram of a quote", and that is how we use it: descriptively, for a type of puzzle. Every puzzle in our library is a cryptoquote in that sense, because every one of them hides a real, attributed quotation.
Cryptoquip — a specific newspaper feature
Cryptoquip is different in kind from the other two words, and this is the distinction most explanations skip. It is not a puzzle category — it is the name of a daily feature distributed by King Features Syndicate to newspapers, the way a comic strip is. The hidden text in a Cryptoquip is characteristically a pun or a groan-worthy wordplay joke rather than a quotation, and in most papers it is printed with a clue letter given away underneath.
That pun-not-quote difference has one real consequence for solving, and it is the opposite of the one people expect. A clue letter makes the opening thirty seconds easier. But the endgame gets harder, because the single most powerful finishing move on a quotation — reading the half-solved line aloud and letting your ear complete a sentence you have heard before — is precisely what a pun is engineered to defeat. On a Cryptoquip you stay on structure to the last letter.
What we publish, and what we don't
Plainly: we do not publish Cryptoquip or King Features' Cryptoquote, and we never will. Those are somebody else's copyrighted daily puzzles. We do not reprint them, we do not host their answers, and if you are here looking for today's syndicated solution, we do not have it and the paper that ran it does.
What we publish is our own puzzles, built from public-domain quotations, with our own ciphers. We use the words "cryptogram" and "cryptoquote" because they are the ordinary English names for what we make. We name Cryptoquip on this page for one reason only — to explain what it is, so you can tell the three apart. Nothing here is affiliated with, endorsed by, or sourced from King Features Syndicate.
What actually changes when you solve one
Almost nothing, and that is the useful conclusion. The cipher is the same monoalphabetic substitution in all three cases, so every technique transfers unchanged: short words first, then frequency, then let the confirmed letters force the rest — the full method is on the pattern reference. Three small adjustments are worth making:
- On a quotation, use the attribution. It is free vocabulary information and most solvers ignore it.
- On a pun, don't. There is no author, and the phrasing is deliberately unnatural.
- On anything with a clue letter given away, spend it immediately — every cell it occupies, before you look at anything else.
One board, three labels
- Read the shape before you decode anything. The three-symbol group
9 23 4appears three times in an eight-word sentence. Nothing else on the board repeats like that. In English, a three-letter word occurring three times in one sentence is THE with very little room for argument — and you know it before you have solved a letter. - Spend the given letters. T = 9 and O = 8. Fill every one of them.
- Commit THE.
9 23 4isT ? ?→ 23 = H, 4 = E. E was not given to you, and you have it on move three, from structure alone. - The two-letter word with a known first symbol.
8 3isO ?→ OF, so 3 = F. - The doubled symbol.
22 8 8 11is? O O ?, and it closes the sentence. Four-letter words of that shape are a short list — GOOD, FOOD, DOOR, BOOK, POOR, MOON. "…of the ___" after a full stop wants an abstract noun, and F is already spoken for: GOOD, giving 22 = G, 11 = D. - Resolve two words against each other.
17 4 12 9is? E ? T, and6 12is a two-letter word ending in the same symbol 12. Only one letter satisfies both at once: S gives? E S Tand? S, both real shapes. 12 = S. - Now the sense arrives.
17 4 12 9=? E S T→ BEST, so 17 = B, and the sentence reads "The BEST is the enemy of the GOOD" — a line you may well recognise, which is worth noticing as its own kind of evidence. - The long word.
4 1 4 20 15isE ? E ? ?, five letters with E first and third → ENEMY: 1 = N, 20 = M, 15 = Y. - Forced.
6 12is? S→ IS (AS does not fit "The best _S the enemy"), so 6 = I. Board complete.
Read it:"The best is the enemy of the good."
Now answer the question this page exists for. What did you just solve? A cryptogram — yes, by definition. A cryptoquote — also yes: the hidden text is an attributed quotation. A Cryptoquip — no, and not because it was harder or easier, but because Cryptoquip is a specific syndicated feature we do not publish. Two of those three answers were about the puzzle. The third was about a publisher.
Only four of the nine steps were guesses. If you want the method that produces that ratio on any board, it is on how to solve cryptograms.
Or browse more Voltaire cryptograms.
Where to solve a cryptoquote here
Every puzzle we publish is an attributed quotation, so any of them will do. Start with easy cryptograms if you want short familiar lines, or philosophy cryptograms if you want the ones worth uncovering.
Common questions
What is the difference between a cryptogram and a cryptoquote?
A cryptoquote is a type of cryptogram. "Cryptogram" is the umbrella term for any text hidden behind a letter-substitution cipher — it could be a joke, a proverb, a line of poetry, anything. A cryptoquote is specifically a cryptogram of a quotation, and normally names the speaker. All cryptoquotes are cryptograms; not all cryptograms are cryptoquotes. Mechanically they are identical and you solve them exactly the same way.
What is a Cryptoquip?
Cryptoquip is the name of a daily puzzle feature distributed by King Features Syndicate to newspapers. It uses the same letter-substitution cipher as any cryptogram, but the hidden text is characteristically a pun or wordplay joke rather than a quotation, and most papers print a clue letter alongside it. Because it is a specific syndicated product rather than a general puzzle type, it is the one word of the three you cannot use generically.
Are cryptoquote and Cryptoquip the same thing?
No. They are two different newspaper features, and only one of the two words has also become a generic term. "Cryptoquote" is now widely used to mean any cryptogram of a quotation, by publishers with no connection to the syndicated feature. "Cryptoquip" has not genericised the same way — it still names one particular daily puzzle from one particular syndicate.
Is a cryptoquote harder than a cryptogram?
Not systematically. Difficulty comes from the text, not the label: how long it is, how many distinct letters it uses, how ordinary its vocabulary is, and how many letters you start with. If anything a quotation is slightly easier than an arbitrary sentence at the same length, because a named author gives you a vocabulary prior and a famous line can be recognised before it is fully decoded. Our own puzzles are scored on those text properties into easy, medium and hard tiers.
Where can I find today's Cryptoquip answer?
Not here, and that is deliberate. Cryptoquip is King Features Syndicate's copyrighted daily puzzle; we do not reprint it and we do not publish its solutions. The answer normally appears in the following day's edition of whichever newspaper you are reading it in. What we offer instead is our own puzzles, made from public-domain quotations, free to solve and never behind a paper's paywall — start with easy cryptograms.
Do you solve cryptoquotes the same way as cryptograms?
Yes — identically. All three of these puzzle names describe the same monoalphabetic substitution cipher, so every technique transfers: fill the letters you were given, attack the one- and two-letter words, count symbols and try the most frequent as E, then let each confirmed letter force the next. The only adjustments are editorial. Use the author's name as a vocabulary hint on a quotation, ignore that instinct on a pun, and spend any given clue letter immediately. The full method is on how to solve cryptograms.