Cryptogram
Past dailiesA well-known quotation has been written in a secret alphabet, where every letter stands for another one. Swap the letters back to read it.
How to play Cryptogram
How to play
Tap a coded letter, then type or tap the letter you think it stands for. Your guess fills in everywhere that coded letter appears. No letter ever stands for itself, and each real letter is used for only one coded letter, so a clash is underlined in red.
Where to start
Look at short words first: a one-letter word is almost always A or I, and THE and AND are very common. Apostrophes help too: a single letter after one is often S or T. The letter counts show which coded letters appear most; E, T, A and O are the most common in English.
Levels
Gentle puzzles are shorter quotes with three letters filled in. Classic puzzles start with one letter, and Tough puzzles are longer quotes with no help at all, unless a letter is needed to rule out a second answer.
Keys
On a keyboard, type letters directly, use the arrow keys to move between letters and Backspace to clear one. The daily cryptogram is the same for everyone.
Questions
What is a cryptogram?
A cryptogram is a short text written in a simple substitution cipher: every letter is swapped for a different letter, the same way throughout. Solving one means working out the swaps, usually from word shapes and how often letters appear.
Where do the quotations come from?
From classic books, plays, poems and speeches, such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and Benjamin Franklin, plus traditional proverbs. We only use writers who died before 1955 and works published before 1929, and we left out sayings that are often misattributed. The source is shown when you solve it.
Can a cryptogram have two answers?
Short quotes sometimes can. Every puzzle here was checked with a word list of about 22,000 everyday English words, and where another reading made of real words was possible, enough letters are filled in from the start to rule it out.
What does a hint do?
If one of your letters is wrong, a hint corrects it. Otherwise it reveals the most common coded letter you haven't solved yet.
Which word lists are used?
Word lists: SCOWL and ENABLE. The uniqueness check uses everyday SCOWL words, filtered by how often they are used. Your guesses are never checked against a list.