Cryptogram solver
Paste any substitution-cipher puzzle — your own, a newspaper cryptoquote, a printed cryptogram — and work it here. Frequency counts, a letter-mapping grid, and word-pattern candidates, all live as you type. Nothing you paste leaves your browser.
This is not an auto-solver: it will not decode the puzzle for you. It gives you the same evidence an experienced solver looks for — see how to solve cryptograms for the method.
Paste your ciphertext
Works with letter-substitution ciphers (A-Z swapped for other letters) and number-coded ciphers (letters swapped for 1-26, the style this site's own puzzles use). For numbers, separate codes with a single space, and mark real word breaks with an extra space or a slash — e.g. "9 4 4 / 12 7" — otherwise the word-pattern panel below can't tell codes apart from word breaks.
How to use the evidence
The frequency table tells you which symbols are worth guessing first — but only loosely on short text. The mapping grid lets you commit a guess and see it applied everywhere at once, so a wrong guess shows itself immediately as an unlikely word. The pattern list turns a word's shape into a short list of real candidates instead of a blank guess. Combine all three the way the step-by-step method describes, and check the pattern reference for the patterns a ~90-word list can't catch.
Prefer puzzles with a known answer?
This tool has no answer key — it is for ciphertext whose plaintext you don't already know. If you would rather solve one of our own puzzles (with hints, stats, and a no-repeat account), browse by difficulty or by category:
- Easy puzzles
- Medium puzzles
- Hard puzzles
- Science puzzles
- Philosophy puzzles
- Art puzzles
- Literature puzzles
- Business puzzles
- Music puzzles
- Psychology puzzles
- Humor puzzles
Or jump straight into the game, or try today's daily puzzle.
Common questions
How does this cryptogram solver work?
Paste your ciphertext and the tool counts how often each symbol appears, splits the text into words, and works out each word's repeated-letter pattern (e.g. "SEE" is the pattern A-B-B). You then assign guessed letters to symbols yourself — the decoded text updates everywhere that symbol appears as you go. There is no auto-solve: the tool gives you the same evidence a human solver uses, not the answer.
Does this decode cryptograms automatically?
No, and that is deliberate. An automatic solver would just hand you the plaintext, which defeats the point of a puzzle — this tool surfaces the same three kinds of evidence described on how to solve cryptograms (frequency, pattern, position) and lets you apply them yourself, one letter at a time.
Is my ciphertext uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything on this page — parsing, counting, pattern matching, decoding — runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent to a server or stored.
Does the solver work with number-coded puzzles as well as letter-substitution ones?
Yes. Paste letters (a classic A-to-Z substitution) or numbers (the style this site's own puzzles use, where each letter is swapped for a number 1-26) — the tool detects runs of digits as a single symbol automatically, so "17 4 12" is read as three symbols, not six. Because a single space also separates numbers within a word, mark real word breaks some other way — an extra space or a slash, e.g. "9 4 4 / 12 7" — or the word-pattern panel will read your whole puzzle as one long word.
Why does the letter count not match the reference table exactly?
Short texts are noisy — see letter frequency in English for the full explanation. A forty-letter cryptogram is nowhere near large enough to reproduce the reference percentages precisely; use the count as a ranked hunch, not a rule, and let word patterns settle disagreements.