How to solve cryptograms
Almost everybody's first cryptogram goes the same way. You stare at the board, look for a word you recognise, find none, and conclude you need to be cleverer than you are. You don't. You need to stop looking for meaning and start looking for shape — because a cryptogram never hides the shape of the sentence, only its letters.
Here is the method, in the order experienced solvers actually apply it.
Before you guess anything: read the shape
Spend fifteen seconds surveying the board before you touch it. You are looking for four things, and none of them require decoding anything:
- How many words, and how long is each. One- and two-letter words are the cheapest way in.
- Punctuation. It survives the cipher untouched. A comma tells you where a clause ends. An apostrophe near the end of a word is almost always followed by S or T, or preceded by N in n't.
- Repeats. Any number that appears twice in the same word, and any word-group that appears twice in the sentence. Both are enormous gifts and both are visible before you know a single letter.
- The last word. It carries the full stop, and sentences end on a small, predictable set of shapes far more often than they begin on one.
Step 1 — spend the letters you were given
Every board opens with a few letters already revealed. Fill in every cell those letters occupy before you do anything else — not just the first one you notice. Two given letters scattered across a twelve-word quote can turn four separate words into near-readable fragments at once, and you cannot see which fragments those are until they are all filled.
You will never be given E. It is the most useful letter on the board and the game makes you earn it.
Step 2 — attack the short words
Short words are where the English language is least free, and that lack of freedom is your lever.
- Three-letter words at the start of a sentence: THE first, then AND, FOR, BUT, NOT, YOU. If a three-letter word repeats anywhere in the puzzle, THE is close to a certainty.
- Two-letter words: the useful list is short — of, to, in, is, it, as, at, be, on, or, an, we, he, do, so, my, up, no, if. Two or three confirmed letters usually collapse it to one candidate.
- One-letter words: A or I, and nothing else. If there are two different single-letter words in the same puzzle, you have just solved both — one is A and the other is I; a repeated three-letter word elsewhere will usually tell you which is which.
Every short word you crack pays out far beyond itself, because those same letters are sitting inside the long words you couldn't touch.
Step 3 — count, then commit
Now count. Find the number that appears most often on the board and try it as E — the most common letter in written English by a wide margin. The next tier is T, A, O, I, N, S, R, H. The mnemonic is ETAOIN SHRDLU, and the first nine of those letters make up roughly seventy per cent of all letters in ordinary English text.
Two honest caveats, because this is where most guides oversell. First, frequency is a prior, not a proof: on a short quote it is routine for T or A to outrank E purely by accident, and a single unusual word can distort the whole count. Second, frequency gets more reliable the longer the text is — which is exactly why it should be your third move and not your first. On a six-word puzzle, short-word structure beats counting every time.
There is a fuller treatment, with real numbers, on letter frequency in English.
Step 4 — let the confirmed letters do the work
This is the part nobody tells beginners, and it is the part that makes cryptograms feel easy once it clicks: you are not solving twenty-six letters, you are solving about five. After roughly the fifth confirmed letter, most of the remaining board is forced rather than guessed.
Work outward from whatever is most nearly complete. A six-letter word reading ? O U R S E has essentially one answer. A word reading T ? E ? E has two. A word ending in a doubled symbol followed by two more is very likely a -LL? or -SS?? shape. Fill the forced ones, and each fill constrains the next word along. Solvers describe the endgame as a collapse rather than a grind, because that is what it is — the fuller pattern library is on the pattern reference.
Step 5 — check before you commit
You get room to be wrong, but not much: two mistakes are survivable and a third ends the run. So before you enter a letter, spend one second on the cheapest check there is — take the letter you are about to commit, look at every other cell carrying that same number, and ask whether the result is still plausible English. If assigning R to number 22 turns some other word into RRTH, your guess was wrong and you just found out for free.
That single habit — test a candidate everywhere before you commit it anywhere — is most of the gap between a solver who finishes and a solver who stalls.
The whole method on one real puzzle
- (Shape.) Nine words. One word —
7 3 7— starts and ends with the same number. One word contains a doubled number,11 9 13 13 2 4. Both are free information. - (Step 1.) Fill every 2 as T and every 13 as O. Four separate words become partly readable at once.
- (Step 2.)
13 16isO ?. A two-letter word starting with O is OF, so 16 = F. - (Step 2.)
2 4 1isT ? ?and opens the sentence: THE. So 4 = H, 1 = E. Note that 1 was already the most frequent number on the board, appearing six times — Step 3's count agrees with Step 2's guess, which is exactly the confirmation you want. - (Step 4.)
11 9 13 13 2 4is? ? O O T H→ SMOOTH, giving 11 = S, 9 = M. The doubled 13 13 you spotted in step 1 is the OO. - (Step 4.)
2 22 12 1isT ? ? E→ TRUE: 22 = R, 12 = U. - (Step 4.)
10 13 12 22 11 1is now? O U R S E→ COURSE, so 10 = C. Five letters confirmed and the board has started collapsing. - (Step 4.)
24 13 19 1is? O ? E→ LOVE: 24 = L, 19 = V. - (Step 4.)
6 1 19 1 22is? E V E R→ NEVER: 6 = N. - (Step 2 again.)
7 3 7is a three-letter word, same letter at both ends, and follows "never": DID. 7 = D, 3 = I. - (Forced.)
22 12 6is alreadyR U N. Nothing left to guess.
Read it:"The course of true love never did run smooth."
Count the actual guesses: steps 3, 4, 5 and 10. Everything else was forced by letters already on the board. That ratio — four decisions, fifteen letters — is what the method buys you.
Or browse more Shakespeare cryptograms.
Where to practise
Method is worthless without reps. Start on easy cryptograms, where more letters open revealed and the quotes are shorter and more familiar, then move to medium once the short-word stage stops feeling like guessing. Got a cipher from somewhere else — a newspaper cryptoquote, a printed puzzle? Try our interactive cryptogram solver tool — it applies this same method to any pasted ciphertext.
Common questions
What is the best way to start a cryptogram?
Fill in the letters you were given, then go straight to the shortest words. One-letter words are A or I. Two-letter words come from a list of about fifteen. A three-letter word at the start of a sentence is usually THE. Cracking short words is worth more than it looks, because those letters then appear inside the long words you could not attack directly.
Which letters should I guess first in a cryptogram?
Try the most frequently appearing symbol as E first — it is the most common letter in English by a clear margin. After that, the high-frequency group is T, A, O, I, N, S, R and H, which together with E account for roughly seventy per cent of ordinary English text. But treat this as a ranked hunch rather than a rule: on a short quote the counts are noisy and word structure is the more reliable guide — see the real numbers on letter frequency in English.
How do you solve a cryptogram without any letters given?
Exactly the same way, just starting one step later. Skip to the short words and the frequency count. Look for a repeated three-letter word (THE), a doubled letter inside a word (LL, EE, SS, OO, TT), an apostrophe followed by one letter (S or T), and any word appearing twice. Fully unassisted puzzles are slower, not different — the deduction chain is identical once the first two or three letters land. Easy cryptograms are a forgiving place to feel that out.
Why can't I finish cryptograms even when I get started?
Almost always one of two things. Either you committed to a letter without checking it everywhere else it appears — a wrong letter poisons four or five other words and makes the whole board look unsolvable — or you are still trying to read the sentence for meaning instead of completing word shapes. When you stall, undo your least-confident letter rather than staring harder at the board.
How long should a cryptogram take?
A short, familiar quote might go in two or three minutes once the method is second nature; a long one with unusual vocabulary can take fifteen or more. First solves are much slower than that, and that is normal — the skill compresses quickly over the first ten or twenty puzzles. Every puzzle page here shows the average solve time other players actually recorded, so you can see what is typical for that specific board rather than guessing.
Does the same method work on cryptoquotes and Cryptoquip-style puzzles?
Yes, identically. Cryptoquotes, Cryptoquip-style puzzles and cryptograms all use the same monoalphabetic substitution cipher; the differences between them are editorial — what kind of text is hidden and who publishes it — not mechanical. See cryptoquote vs cryptogram for the distinctions that do matter.