Free cryptogram puzzles
A cryptogram is a short quotation with every letter swapped for another one, consistently. Whatever stands for A stands for A the whole way through, and the same goes for the other twenty-five. Nothing is hidden but the mapping, so the puzzle is figuring out which letter is which.
In the browser, no account needed.
You are never dealt the same puzzle twice
Nothing you have already seen comes back, whether you press New Puzzle twice in a row or arrive three collections later. Sign up to see your completed and in-progress puzzles, keep your history across devices, and earn achievements! Without an account, your history stays in temporary visit memory so your next puzzle will still be fresh.
What about running out of puzzles? I know a couple of you will manage it, but with new collections dropping frequently, there’s always a new code to crack.
Quotations out of books, one book at a time
There are 10,106 of them and not one came off a list of famous sayings. Each is a passage from a published work, and each collection is a single book. Read classic literature while building your codebreaking skills.
That is what makes a collection worth working through instead of dipping into. Spend an evening inside Pride and Prejudice and what you decode, sentence after sentence, is Austen. The whole catalog is here.
The grades are measured, and the workings are published
Every quotation is scored on what its own letters give away. We use metrics like how many distinct letters it uses, how many of those appear exactly once, how many one- and two-letter words it has, whether it contains an apostrophe, whether E leads its frequency table. There is a page for each grade with the numbers behind it, which is the point of grading them at all: easy, medium and hard.
If this is your first one
Check the cipher key and start at the top of the list. Find a three-letter word that repeats and try “the,” a common word that could solve three letters at once. Find a single-letter word and try “a.” Then read what those choices suggest about the words around them: a cryptogram comes apart by words rather than by letters, and every letter you place leaves a word somewhere else nearly unveiled.
The cipher key beside the grid keeps the frequency count for you, and a letter you have already ruled out against a symbol is grayed out on the keyboard, so the same wrong guess cannot be spent twice. More about the site.