A cryptogram looks impenetrable for about the first ninety seconds. Then a single word falls, that word gives you four or five letters elsewhere in the puzzle, and the whole thing unravels in a rush. Getting to that first foothold is the entire skill, and it is far more systematic than it appears. What follows is the method that experienced solvers use, in roughly the order they use it.
First, resist the urge to guess
The instinct of most beginners is to stare at the puzzle and hope a word jumps out. Occasionally one does, but hope is not a technique. A wrong guess entered early is worse than no guess at all, because every substitution you commit to propagates through the entire puzzle and poisons the letters around it. Discipline at the start saves a great deal of erasing later.
Instead, spend the first pass gathering information without committing to anything. Read the puzzle for its shape, not its meaning.
Read the shape of the puzzle
Look at what the cipher cannot hide. Word lengths are preserved exactly. Repeated letters within a word are visible. Punctuation is untouched. Every one of these is a structural clue that survives encryption, and together they usually determine the solution before you have identified a single letter with certainty.
Specifically, note the following:
- How many one-letter words there are, and where
- Every apostrophe, and how many letters follow it
- The shortest words, especially the two and three-letter ones
- Any doubled letters
- The single most frequently repeated symbol in the whole puzzle
One-letter words are nearly free
In English, a standalone letter is A or I, and almost nothing else. Occasionally you meet O in older or poetic quotations. A is roughly five times more common than I as a single-letter word in ordinary prose, so if you must choose, choose A, but note the alternative in the margin rather than forgetting it exists.
This is the cheapest information in the puzzle. Take it first.
Apostrophes give away their endings
An apostrophe is enormously informative because only a handful of letter patterns can follow one. If a single letter follows the apostrophe, it is overwhelmingly likely to be S, and the word is a possessive or a contraction such as IT''S or HE''S. Also possible but rarer are T, as in DON''T and WON''T, D, as in HE''D, and M, as in I''M.
If two letters follow, your candidates are RE, VE, and LL, as in THEY''RE, WE''VE and THEY''LL. All three are common. Notice that each of these tells you something about the word before the apostrophe as well, since the set of words taking RE or VE is small.
Attack the three-letter words
Now go after the three-letter words, which is where most cryptograms are actually broken. THE is the most common three-letter word in English by an enormous margin, and it is also the most common word of any length. If a three-letter pattern appears more than once in a short puzzle, test THE first.
The confirmation you want is the T. Having tentatively assigned THE, check whether your candidate for T also appears at the start of other plausible words, and whether your E turns up frequently throughout the puzzle, which it should. E is the most common letter in English at around twelve to thirteen percent, so if your newly assigned E appears only once in a fifty-letter puzzle, you have almost certainly guessed wrong. Back it out immediately.
Other three-letter words worth holding in reserve: AND, FOR, NOT, BUT, YOU, ALL, ARE, HER, HAS, ONE, OUT, WHO, ITS, NOW, CAN, HAD.
Doubled letters narrow quickly
A doubled letter in the middle or at the end of a word is a strong constraint. The letters that most commonly double in English are L, S, E, O, T, F, N and R. The letters that essentially never double include H, J, K, Q, V, W, X and Y. So a doubled symbol immediately eliminates roughly a third of the alphabet as candidates.
Doubled letters at the very end of a word are especially useful: LL, SS, EE and OO account for the overwhelming majority of cases, as in WELL, LESS, FREE and TOO.
Use the endings
English words end in a small set of patterns far more often than chance would suggest. If you have a long word and know a letter or two at its end, the following endings are worth testing: ING, ION, TION, MENT, NESS, ABLE, ED, LY, ER, EST, FUL, OUS.
The pair ING is particularly valuable because it links three letters at once, and because the N and G it supplies are hard to obtain any other way. Similarly, if you have identified T and I and are looking at a long word ending in a four-letter run, TION should be your first test.
Watch the letter that follows Q
This is a small point but it has decided many puzzles. In English, Q is essentially always followed by U. If you have any reason to suspect a symbol is Q, the symbol after it is U, free of charge. The same logic applies more loosely elsewhere: after an initial consonant cluster you are usually looking at a vowel, and a symbol that appears adjacent to a very wide variety of other symbols is more likely a vowel than a consonant.
A worked example
Suppose you are looking at this fragment, where each letter stands for another:
- XQY GVWX MRUYOXKRY
The second word has four letters with the third repeated nowhere, the first word has three letters and appears often elsewhere in the puzzle. Try THE for the first word. That gives you X equals T, Q equals H, Y equals E.
Substituting into the rest: the second word becomes T H space, no, it becomes G V W T with the T at the end, and the third becomes a nine-letter word ending in E with an E in the third position from the start. A four-letter word ending in T whose other letters are unknown, sitting between THE and a long word, is very likely BEST, LAST, MOST or NEXT. Test each. If G equals M, V equals O, W equals S, then MOST fits and the sentence reads THE MOST followed by a nine-letter word beginning with A. Now MRUYOXKRY with M equals A, Y equals E, X equals T gives A blank blank E blank T blank blank E. ADVENTURE fits. Enter it, and you have gained D, V, N, U and R in one stroke.
That cascade is the characteristic experience of solving a cryptogram, and it is why the early discipline pays off.
When you get stuck
Stuck usually means one of two things. Either you have an incorrect letter committed somewhere, or you are staring at the wrong part of the puzzle. For the first, look for the tell: a word that has become unpronounceable, a vowel that appears too rarely, a consonant cluster that no English word contains. Back out the most recent uncertain assignment and try the alternative.
For the second, simply move. Find the longest word you have partly filled and work on that instead, or count frequencies again now that you know more. Fresh eyes on a different word is often all it takes.
Building speed
Speed comes almost entirely from pattern recognition rather than from thinking faster. Solvers who finish quickly have seen THE, AND, THAT, WITH and ING so many times that they no longer test them, they simply recognize them. The fastest route to that familiarity is volume: one puzzle a day, consistently, will make you noticeably quicker within a month. It also helps to notice, at the end of each puzzle, which clue actually broke it open. Over time you learn where your own eye goes first, and where it should have gone.