Advanced Cryptogram Techniques for Harder Grids

Easy cryptograms hand you four letters, and those letters carry the first few words. At the hard level there is no such gift. Every letter must be earned from the shape of the sentence. This page collects the techniques that make that possible, and then decodes a real hard puzzle from the first move to the last, with every step checked against the answer.

What changes without given letters

The Cryptogram assistant of LogikLand gives 4 letters at the easy level, 2 at medium and none at hard and expert. When the helping letters disappear, a solver needs a place to start that does not depend on luck. There are three: how often a code appears, what shape a word has, and which letters a code cannot be.

Technique 1: count the codes

Write the 26 codes in a row and tally each one. In English the commonest letters in LogikLand's own list of 2,040 sentences are:

The order is a tendency. In one sentence the order can be very different, so count first and then use the table as a rule of thumb: the top code is probably E, the next ones are among T, A, O, R, N, S. The codes that appear only once or twice are often rare letters such as K, V, Z, Q or X.

Technique 2: read the shape of a word

A word has a shape even when its letters are hidden. Give each new letter in a word a new label: THE becomes ABC, LITTLE becomes ABCCAD, STREET becomes ABCDDB. Only a few words have a given shape, so the shape is a strong clue. Three kinds of shape are worth memorising:

• Short words. In our sentence list, a one-letter word is A in 948 cases and I in 186. The commonest two-letter words are WE, OF, IN, TO and MY. The commonest three-letter words are THE (2,422 times) and AND (881).
• Double letters. The commonest pairs are LL, OO, EE, TT and SS. A word with a doubled code is very likely to be one of these.
• Repeated letters at a distance. A word such as CORNER has the same letter at its third and sixth places (ABCDEC). That shape is rare and fits only a few words.

An apostrophe is another anchor. Where an apostrophe appears in our sentences, it is followed by S in 58 of 60 cases, so a single letter after an apostrophe is nearly always S.

Technique 3: eliminate

In a letter-code cryptogram from LogikLand, a letter is never coded by itself. That means the code letter L is certain not to be the real letter L, which removes one candidate from each of the 26 codes. The same idea works for the rest of the puzzle: once a real letter is assigned, it is no longer available for another code. When a two-letter word has only one candidate left, you have a new letter for free. Our suggestion, not a rule: keep a list of the real letters still unplaced beside the puzzle, and cross each one off as you use it.

A hard cryptogram, solved

The puzzle below is a hard cryptogram made by the generator, so no letter is given. The solution is shown next to it.

1. Count. The code P appears 16 times out of 84 letters, far ahead of W (8) and Q (7). It is almost certainly E.
2. Find the short word. The three-letter word WGP appears four times and ends in the code we think is E. That is THE, so W = T and G = H. W is the second most frequent code, as T should be.
3. Use a shape. XCWWXP has the shape ABCCAD. With T T in the middle and E at the end, ? ? T T ? E is LITTLE: X = L and C = I.
4. Use the comma. The three-letter word HJK follows a comma and comes before THE. It is AND: H = A, J = N, K = D. The last word, NQPHK, now reads ? ? E A D.
5. Use doubles. IWQPPW is ? T ? E E T and IAPXXI is ? ? E L L ?. They are STREET and SMELLS: I = S, Q = R, A = M. The last word is BREAD.
6. Eliminate. LJ is a two-letter word that ends in N. AN and IN are out because A and I already have codes, which leaves ON: L = O.
7. Finish. With O, R, N, E known, ELQJPQ reads ? O R N E R, which is CORNER. LUPJI is OPENS, NPVLQP is BEFORE and OGLXP is WHOLE. Every code now has a letter.

When the code is numbers

At the expert level the codes are numbers from 1 to 26 in mixed order. The techniques are the same, because a number is only another label for a letter. What changes is the page: numbers are harder to scan than letters, so tally them on a separate strip of paper. The free cryptogram maker also lets you choose a number code, and gives you 0 to 5 hint letters, so you can try an expert-style puzzle with your own sentence before you commit to a book.

Mistakes that cost time

• Writing a guess in ink, or in all the places at once. Write it in pencil, and test it on one other word first.
• Forgetting the table. The table of 26 letters at the bottom of the page shows which letters are still free.
• Fixing on one word. If a word will not move, leave it and work on another one: new letters will come back and unlock it.

The free cryptogram maker makes a single puzzle from a message you write. A full book needs a free account and the Cryptogram assistant: create a free account to start. If you are new, read how to solve a cryptogram first, and see the cryptogram rules for the basics.

Questions