About Cryptogram Press

Written and checked by hand. Last reviewed July 25, 2026.

Cryptogram Press publishes one cryptogram a day, sets it in type you can read without hunting for your glasses, and tells you exactly where the quotation came from. It is run by one person. This page explains what that means in practice, because a site that asks you to trust its sources owes you an account of how it handles them.

The editorial standard

Here is the rule we work to, stated plainly enough to be held to:

That middle sentence costs us more than it sounds like. Quotation collections are full of lines that everyone knows are by Franklin, or Einstein, or Twain, and that appear nowhere in what those people actually wrote. They are the most quotable material available, precisely because they have been polished by decades of retelling. Roughly a third of the quotations we had assembled fell into that category, and they are not on this site.

They are not deleted either. They sit in a review queue. When one of them can be traced to a real source, it comes back with the source attached. When it turns out to be a misattribution with a identifiable true author, it comes back under the right name. Some will never come back.

What we print with each puzzle, and why

Under the answer to every daily puzzle you will find the author, the year, and the work the quotation appears in. Not just a name. A name on its own is an assertion; a name with a source is a claim you can check, and we would rather be checkable than impressive.

Where a line is a later paraphrase of something someone said rather than their own wording, we say so and credit the person who actually phrased it. There is at least one famous line in circulation that is universally credited to Aristotle and was in fact written by his twentieth-century summariser Will Durant. On this site it appears under Durant's name, with a note.

Why the type is this big

Because the people who solve these puzzles have been solving them for thirty years, and small grey print on a phone is not a design detail to them, it is the difference between doing the puzzle and not.

Concretely: body text is set at twenty pixels rather than the usual sixteen, cipher letters larger still, with extra spacing between letters so that similar shapes stay distinguishable. Every page has a text-size control in the top corner with three settings, because a fair number of readers do not know how to zoom a browser and should not have to. Text contrast is well above the accessibility minimum throughout, and nothing important is conveyed by colour alone. Page zoom is never disabled — which sounds like a low bar until you find how many puzzle sites disable it.

Nothing on this site pops up, slides in, counts down, or covers what you are reading. There are no interstitials and no exit prompts. If that seems like a strange thing to boast about, compare it with the alternatives for an afternoon.

How the site pays for itself

There is no advertising here and there will not be. There is no newsletter capture, no account, no tracking across other websites, and no data sold to anyone. The site does not set cookies.

It is paid for by the iPhone app, which is free to download and offers a subscription for people who want the things a web page cannot do well: an unbroken daily streak, offline play, the complete archive, personal statistics, and sync across devices. If you never buy it, nothing here degrades. That is the deal, and it is the whole deal.

How the puzzles are made

Quotations are drawn from public-domain sources — Bartlett's, Poor Richard's Almanack, Shakespeare, Emerson, Thoreau, Marcus Aurelius in the nineteenth-century translations, Lincoln, Douglass, Twain — then checked, scored for difficulty, and scheduled.

The cipher itself is generated by a program from the puzzle's own identifier, using a fixed procedure with no randomness at the moment you load the page. Two consequences follow, both deliberate: everyone in the world gets the same puzzle on the same day, and the same puzzle in the app and on the website is genuinely the same puzzle. The rules the generator enforces, including the guarantee that no letter ever stands for itself, are set out on the rules page.

Corrections

If a quotation here is wrong — misattributed, misdated, misquoted — we want to know, and a correction that comes with a citation will be made. This is the part of the site most likely to contain an error, because it is the part where we are making claims about the world rather than about arithmetic.

Write to [email protected] with the date of the puzzle and what you believe is wrong. We read everything and we correct in place.

What we deliberately do not do

• We do not publish answers to newspaper puzzles. Cryptoquote and Cryptoquip are syndicated features belonging to their publishers. We are not affiliated with them, and we publish only our own puzzles and our own answers.
• We do not run a random puzzle generator on the web. One puzzle a day, the way a paper does it. The daily rhythm is the point of the thing.
• We do not require an account. Nothing here needs to know who you are.
• We do not publish a quotation we cannot source. See above. This is the one that costs, and it is the one we are least willing to bend on.

Cryptogram Press is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to King Features Syndicate, Hearst, or any other puzzle syndicate. Cryptoquote and Cryptoquip are the names of their respective publishers' features and are used here only to describe those puzzles.

Questions we get

Keep reading

• How to solve a cryptogramThe full method, step by step, with a worked example.
• The daily archiveEvery past cryptogram, filed by year and month.
• The iPhone appStreaks, offline play, the full archive and iCloud sync.
• Cryptogram rulesWhat the setter guarantees, and what that lets you assume.
• Privacy policyWhat the app and this site do and do not collect.
• Terms of useThe terms covering the app and this website.