Welcome to our free cryptogram game! What's a cryptogram, you say? It's a special type of puzzlewhere a famous quote is encrypted with a scrambled alphabet cipher, where each letter has beenreplaced with a different letter. This is known as a substitution cipher (technical term: monoalphabetic substitution cipher).Your job is to figure out which letters have been substitutedfor each other and crack the code. If you're a casual player, try our casual play mode which gives you access to plenty of hints and help. Experienced cipher-crackersshould try out the expert mode.
The cryptograms are organized by topic (see the list of topics on this page). We also have a coupleof "editor's choice" collections, where we organized a series of quotes into a set of puzzles you can work your way through. Either way, bookmark this page and check back regularly since we addquotes on a regular basis and are editing several new collections.
When you figure out the cryptogram, we score your results and compare them with other players. Your points score is based on your solution time and how many hints are used. For casualplayers, don't be afraid to use your hints - we give you five free hints to start and you canuse extra hints if you're stuck. Expert games offer theoption of using NO Hints (hardcore play!) for a higher score. After you solve the puzzle, we compare your raw points with everyone else who solved the puzzle to get a ranking.
How To Solve A Cryptogram?
Simple letter substitution ciphers have been around for thousands of years. These were consideredstate of the art during the late Roman Empire, both the simple Caesar cipher (substitution cipherbased on a consistent "shift" in the letters) to more advanced matrixs and letter swap routines.They have been used by military strategists, politicians, revolutionaries, and secret lovers.Today, they survive as a popular puzzle and brain teaser.The easy ones can be used as cryptograms for kids.
Professional level solving involves things such as frequency analysis. You look for the most common letters in the cipher and compare it with the letter frequency of the english language. You can also look for letter patterns within words and compare them across words; since the letter patterns need to be consistent across the puzzle, the same letter cannot fit in different patterns. Repeated letters are another weakness. This should be enough to break any simple substitution cipher.
More advanced forms of encrypted text will use multiple alphabets to resist cracking. A vigenere cipher is designed to rotate alphabets to resist breaking of the ciphertext. This is a far more effective form of encryption.
5 Tips For Solving Cryptograms
- One Letter Words: Potentially the easiest ones to guess, due to the limited possibilities(I, A, O).
- Study Punctuation: This is another easy target. If you see an apostrophe towards the endof the word, you're dealing with a contraction (don't, you're) or possessive (owner's, firm's).There's a limited set of potential letters in that part of the word.
- 2 / 3 Letter Words: This is the same idea as with the one letter words. There's only asmall number of possible words, most of which may not make sense in context. Take a look at alist of two letter words andthree letter words to brush up. Theodds improve significantly if you already know a few letters from a hint, contraction, or oneletter word. Double Letters are also a big give away (eg. All, SEE, ADD) - there are only a few short words that fit this pattern.
- Context: Remember that you're usually solve for a quote - plus we often tell you who saidthe remark and what the cryptogram is about. The Lord of the Rings characters are probably talkingabout heroic war and magic. If the puzzle is above love, think about words related to love. Comedy quotes usually contain some kind of irony. This helps narrow down the possible words.
- Sentance Position: Building on the concept of using the concept the context of a wordto crack a cryptogram, rememberthat english sentances tend to follow common patterns. Thereis a subject, verb, and various common clauses. Look for connector words as well. Similarly,look for repeated words (and almost similar words) to identify where the author was likelyusing some type of metaphor or inversion (comparing different things) to make their point.
