Cryptogram Solver — Crack a Substitution Cipher Instantly

Solve a cryptogram Word pattern finder

Your encrypted text

Uppercase and lowercase are treated as the same letter. Numbers and symbols are left untouched. Up to 40 words, 20 characters per word.

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—words in the puzzle

—distinct cipher letters

—letters solved

—best solution score

Your decoded text will appear here.

The solver is standing by. Paste a puzzle above and press Solve it.

Your letter key

Set a letter by hand whenever you want to. Anything you set here is treated as a known crib, so the solver will only ever look for solutions that agree with it.

Reset the key Click a candidate word below to set its letters into the key.

Candidate words, by position

Each row is one encrypted word and the plain words that fit its letter pattern and your current key. The number in brackets is how common the word is, which is the single most useful signal in a cryptogram.

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Every complete decryption the search reached, best first. Click one to load it into the key.

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What a cryptogram is, and what a solver actually does

A cryptogram takes a piece of plain text and replaces every letter with another letter, using one fixed key for the whole message. The key is a permutation of the alphabet, so the puzzle has exactly one correct reading, and the same letter always stands for the same letter. That last point is the whole trick. It means the encrypted text is not random noise; it is English with the names of things changed, and the shape of the English survives even when the letters do not.

What survives is the pattern. A four-letter word whose first and last letters are the same stays a four-letter word with matching ends. A word with no repeated letters stays a word with no repeated letters. A six-letter word with a double letter in the middle keeps that double letter. A solver exploits this by turning the puzzle into a large but finite search: for every encrypted word, it looks up every real English word with the same letter pattern, then it tries combinations until the letters line up consistently across the whole message.

Two things make the search practical. The first is the vocabulary. This tool ships with an eighty-thousand-word frequency-ordered English list, so it knows which of the several hundred words that match a pattern are the ones a real sentence would use. Without a frequency model, a solver returns thousands of equally plausible readings; with one, it returns the two or three that are actually sentences. The second is the consistency constraint. A single guess in a cryptogram is usually worthless, but a guess that fits with five other words already solved is extremely strong, so a good solver spends its effort on the most constrained word first rather than the first word in the sentence.

What the solver produces is a ranked list of complete decryptions, not a single answer with a confidence percentage attached. In a well-constructed puzzle there is one answer that reads as English, and it will be the top of the list. In a puzzle with a short or repetitive phrase, several readings may be equally grammatical, and the list is honest about that.

The letter frequency table worth memorising

Before you use any tool, learn the shape of English. In a long piece of text, the letters are not close to evenly distributed, and that skew is what lets a human solver guess faster than a machine can search. The table below is the standard English letter distribution, and it is the reason a cipher symbol that turns up six times in a paragraph is probably an E, a T or an A.

Two practical consequences follow. First, in a puzzle of thirty words or more, the single most frequent cipher symbol is E with very high probability, and the second most frequent is T or A. Second, once you have guessed one letter, the letter that sits next to it in several different words is strongly hinted by the table: a cipher symbol that consistently follows the E symbol is far more likely to be I, T, R or A than it is to be Z.

Patterns: the most useful skill in any cryptogram

Before you count letters, look at the shapes. Every encrypted word tells you the shape of the word it hides, and a handful of shapes cover most of English.

ABCDE — all different ABCAD ABACD AABCD AABBC ABAB

The most common three-letter words in English have three different letters, so a three-letter word of shape ABC is worth working on early: possible answers include the, and, for, but, not, you, are, was, his, her, all, any, one, two, how, its, out, off, new, old, our, who, did, get, has, had, can, may, way, see, now, man, boy, day, big, few, too, own, say, she, use, try, ask, men, run, end, ago, air, low, ago, add, age, ago, ago, tie, war, oil, eye, bed, top, bad, key, job, law, lay, lot, mix, odd, pop, raw, row, sad, set, sit, six, ten, tax, tea, ten, win, act, arm, art, box, bus, car, cup, dog, ear, egg, far, fit, fly, gun, hat, hen, ice, ink, jam, leg, lip, map, mud, net, nut, oak, pan, pen, pig, pot, red, sea, sky, son, tea, van, wall, web, yes, zoo, and so on. The pattern alone does not pick the answer, but it narrows the field enormously.

Some shapes are almost diagnostic. A four-letter word of shape ABAB is very often a repeated syllable: that, this, will, will, else, ever, high, no, go, so, on, or, us, we, be, he, by, do, if, in, is, it, my, of, to. A six-letter word of shape ABCABC is usually a reduplicated word such as the the, or a word like bonbon, or the word whose halves are the same such as "cousin" is not, but "murmur", "tartar", "tsetse" and "diddly" are. A five-letter word of shape ABCAB is nearly always a word with a doubled root, such as level, refer, radar, civic, rotor, kayak, salad, comma, occur, allot, staff, and words like "berry" (B-E-R-R-Y is ABCBD, not this shape, which is the point: pattern matching tells you what kind of word you are looking for).

The second tab of the tool on this page does exactly this for you. Type a pattern such as ABCDE or ABAB and it lists every word in the vocabulary with that shape, most common first. It is the fastest way to turn a single word in a puzzle into a short list you can reason about.

Cribs: the fastest way into a hard puzzle

A crib is a piece of information you bring to the puzzle from outside it: a word you already know is in there, a name, a phrase, a piece of trivia. Cribs are how you defeat a cryptogram that has resisted pattern analysis, and they are why the tool has a letter key you can fill in by hand.

Suppose the puzzle is about a Canadian city and contains a seven-letter word. If you know the theme, you can try the most likely seven-letter city names as a crib. Each guess either eliminates letters or confirms the key, and a single confirmed crib can unlock the rest of the puzzle because it usually pins two or three letters at once, and every other word in the puzzle that uses those letters narrows immediately.

Common crib sources, in rough order of usefulness: the puzzle's own theme or category, a capitalised word that is probably a proper noun, a contraction like "don't" or "it's", a number word, a word that has to appear because the sentence needs it, and the punctuation. A single apostrophe is a gift. If the encrypted text has a five-letter word followed by an apostrophe and a two-letter word, you have "don't", "can't", "it's", "he's", "we're", "I'll", "won't", "didn't" or "that's", and each of those pins two letters instantly.

On this page, set cribs by choosing a letter in the key grid and giving it its plain value. Everything after that is a hard constraint, and the solver will only return solutions that agree with it.

Strategies that work on puzzles that resist you

• Start with the odd word, not the first word. The longest word with the rarest pattern is usually the easiest to pin down, because it has the fewest possible answers. The first word of a sentence is often something as unconstrained as THE.
• Pick the two-letter words first. A two-letter word is one of about forty possibilities, and finding which one it is tells you a cipher letter immediately.
• Count the double letters. If a symbol appears twice in a five-letter word, that word is probably one of the small family of words with a doubled letter in the middle: letter, better, summer, dinner, letter, occur, error, offer, bottle, little, people, bottle, happy, penny, funny, sorry, worry, marry, carry, story, world, would, could, should. This list is short enough to brute force by hand.
• Use the letter table on neighbours, not just counts. Once one letter is fixed, look at what sits beside it everywhere it appears. A symbol that always follows the letter you have decoded as E is very likely to be I, T, R or A.
• Watch for the -ING, -ED, -S endings. In any long encrypted passage there are usually a handful of words ending in the same symbol. That symbol is one of G, D, S, N or T, and the four possibilities are easy to test against the rest of the puzzle.
• Fill in the words you are sure of and read around them. Once half a sentence is decoded, the other half often follows from grammar alone, and the solver can confirm it.
• Do not trust a word that fits but makes no sense. A cryptogram is a real sentence. If a candidate decoding produces English words in a row that do not parse, the mapping is wrong somewhere, even if each word individually is a valid word.

Canadian and American spelling in a cryptogram

Substitution ciphers are unusually good at exposing spelling differences, because a letter is either the right letter or it is not. If a puzzle was written in Canadian English and you are used to American spelling, a single wrong letter can keep the whole sentence from resolving, and the tool will show you a solution that is one letter away from a real phrase.

The differences that actually appear in puzzles are short and learnable. Colour against color, centre against center, cheque against check, neighbour against neighbor, defence against defense, licence against license as a noun, favourite against favorite, honour against honor, labour against labor, behaviour against behavior, humour against humor, flavour against flavor, harbour against harbor, theatre against theater, metre against meter as a measure, and travelling against traveling with one L or two.

The pattern is always the same. The Canadian form is longer, and it is the U that is added: colour has one extra letter, centre has one, neighbour has one, favourite has one, honour has one, labour has one, behaviour has one, humour has one, flavour has one, harbour has one, theatre has one, defence has one, licence has one. So if a puzzle refuses to resolve and you are hunting for a six-letter word where you expected five, look for a Canadian spelling before you look for anything else. And if a puzzle will not resolve and you are hunting for a five-letter word where you expected six, try the American form of every word you have already placed, because that is the same problem in reverse.

You can also use the tool to test the hypothesis directly. Set the key so one cipher letter decrypts to U, solve again, and see whether the solution snaps into place. If it does, you have just found the difference that was blocking you, and the puzzle is finished.

Different kinds of cryptogram

Not every cryptogram is a simple substitution, and knowing which kind you are looking at saves a lot of time.

Simple substitution

Every letter is replaced by one other letter, consistently. This is the type on this page, and it is by far the most common in newspapers, puzzle books and mobile cryptogram apps. It is fully solvable by search, because the constraint that the same symbol always means the same letter is enormously powerful.

Substitution with a shifted alphabet

The classic Caesar cipher, where every letter shifts by a fixed number of places. There are only twenty-six possible keys, so you can brute force it by eye, and this tool solves it as a special case. Caesar shifts also leave letter frequencies intact, which is why they are the first thing to try when a cryptogram looks like ROT-13.

Transposition

The letters are the same, but the order is scrambled, often in blocks. No substitution has happened, so letter frequency tells you nothing and the pattern is meaningless. Instead, look for unusual letter pairs, especially a Q with no U, and consider that the puzzle may be a rail fence or a columnar scramble. A solver built for substitution will not help you here.

Quotations and themed puzzles

Most published cryptograms are quotations, and the quotation is usually the hard part. Knowing the source unlocks the puzzle instantly, which is why the crib advice above works so well. If the quotation is from a well-known song, poem or speech, a solver plus a memory of the line finishes the job in seconds.

Polyalphabetic ciphers

When the key changes as you go, usually in repeating blocks of letters, the simple frequency signal breaks down. Vigenere is the classic example. These are solvable with a solver that knows about the key length, but a search-only substitution tool will not crack them, and this page does not claim to.

How to use the solver as a learning tool

The fastest way to get better at cryptograms is to watch how they come apart, not to have them solved for you. The tool is deliberately built so that you can see the intermediate work. The candidate list for each word is ordered by how common each candidate is, which is exactly the reasoning a human solver does, only faster. The letter key lets you see the effect of a single crib propagating through the puzzle.

A good practice routine takes five minutes. Solve one puzzle by hand first, using the frequency table and the pattern list, and note where you got stuck. Then open the same puzzle here, and instead of reading the answer, work down the candidate lists until you reach the same word you were about to guess. The difference between your reasoning and the tool's is usually that the tool had three hundred candidates for a word and you had five in mind, because you had not yet noticed the pattern. Once you have seen the pattern, you will start noticing it yourself.

Second routine: after a puzzle is solved, look at the distribution of the cipher key. If the key is a random permutation, the puzzle was made by a machine. If the key is a shifted alphabet, it was made by a person using a Caesar shift. If the key swaps A with M, B with N, and so on, it was made with a half-turn. Recognising the key's structure tells you the puzzle's level of difficulty before you start, which is a genuinely useful skill.

Frequently asked questions

What does a cryptogram solver do?

It searches for the plain text behind an encrypted quotation. The tool indexes an eighty-thousand-word English vocabulary by letter pattern, so for every encrypted word it can list every real word with the same shape. It then tries combinations of those candidates, discarding any combination where the same cipher symbol is forced to mean two different letters, and scores the complete decryptions that survive using a letter-frequency and letter-pair model. The highest scoring readings are returned first. The whole search runs in your browser on your own machine, so your puzzle is never uploaded anywhere.

Is it legal or fair to use a solver?

It depends entirely on the puzzle. A newspaper cryptogram is a published puzzle with a single answer and no stakes, and using a tool to check your work is no different from using a dictionary. A competitive cryptogram, such as one in an escape room or a timed puzzle hunt, may have rules against tools, and you should respect them. This site publishes the tool for practice, for learning the pattern method, and for anyone stuck on a puzzle they are working on privately.

Why did it not solve my puzzle?

There are four usual reasons. The puzzle is a transposition rather than a substitution, in which case the letter patterns mean nothing and this tool cannot help. The vocabulary is missing a word, most often a proper noun, an abbreviation or a technical term, and you can add it to the key by hand. The quote is short, in which case several readings are grammatical and the tool shows you all of them rather than pretending one is certain. Or the puzzle is not a simple one-to-one substitution at all. If the candidate list for a word is empty, that word is the one to look at first, because it means the key is wrong somewhere before that point.

How do I enter the puzzle?

Paste the encrypted text exactly as it appears, keeping the spaces and punctuation. Capital letters are treated the same as small letters, so you do not need to worry about the case the puzzle was printed in. Numbers, punctuation and line breaks are passed through untouched and do not affect the search. The tool accepts up to forty words of up to twenty characters each, which covers every published puzzle.

What does the number in brackets next to a candidate word mean?

It is that word's rank in a frequency-ordered English list, so a lower number means a more common word. It is the single most useful number in cryptogram solving, because the most frequent candidate that still fits the pattern is almost always the right one. A candidate ranked in the hundreds is worth trying; one ranked in the tens of thousands is usually a coincidence of shape rather than a real possibility.

Can I use this on a mobile phone?

Yes. The page is built to work on a phone, the solver runs locally so there is no upload wait, and the key grid reflows to fit the screen. The only thing that needs a bigger screen is reading a long candidate list, which is why the lists are wrapped chips rather than a wide table. You can paste a puzzle from another app, solve it, and copy the answer straight back out with the copy button.

Does it work offline?

The solver logic and the vocabulary are both bundled with the site, so once the page has loaded, the solving happens entirely on your device and does not need a connection. Only the first visit needs the network, to fetch the page and the vocabulary file. Nothing you type is ever sent to a server, and there is no account, no sign-up and no tracking of what you paste.

Is this page affiliated with any cryptogram app or publication?

No. AnyWordSolver is an independent, free site. The word "cryptogram" is used here in its ordinary sense of a letter-substitution puzzle, which is a general term for a very old form of puzzle. This tool is not connected to, endorsed by, or sponsored by any app, newspaper or broadcaster that publishes cryptograms, and it does not reproduce any published puzzle or quotation.

How long does the solve take?

On a modern laptop or phone, a typical thirty-word puzzle is solved in well under a second. The vocabulary is indexed once when the page loads, which takes a moment, and after that each solve is a search rather than a rebuild. Very long puzzles with unusual vocabulary can take longer, and in that case the tool returns the best readings it has found so far rather than hanging, and tells you that the search was cut short.

What if the puzzle uses Canadian spelling?

Try it as-is first, and if the solution refuses to resolve, look for one extra letter in a word where you expected fewer. The Canadian forms all add a U, so colour, centre, neighbour, favourite, honour, labour, behaviour, humour, flavour, harbour, theatre, defence and cheque are all one letter longer than their American spellings. Setting that U in the key and solving again is usually the whole fix. The page has a longer section on this, because it is the most common reason a substitution puzzle refuses to come apart.

More word puzzle tools on this site

If you are working through a puzzle book, the rest of this site has the tools that cover the other puzzle types. The anagram solver handles a scrambled-letter puzzle, the word search solver finds the hidden words in a grid, and the Scrabble solver gives you the best play from the letters in front of you. The five-letter word list is the raw material behind most daily word games, and the word finder hub collects every one of them on a single page. For a different kind of challenge, the crossword solver is the tool for grid puzzles, where the constraint is crossing letters rather than a substitution key.

• Anagram Solver — unscramble a jumble of letters
• Word Search Solver — find every word in a grid
• Scrabble Solver — best plays from your rack
• Crossword Solver — fill a grid from your crossings
• 5-Letter Words — the full list
• Wordle Solver — filter by pattern, like the pattern tab here
• Letter Boxed Solver — every word inside a 3×3 grid
• Word Games — every daily puzzle in one place