Cryptoquip Solver

Start with the clue letter

Nearly every Cryptoquip is printed with one line of help beneath it, along the lines of Today’s Cryptoquip Clue: A equals D. It is telling you that one cipher letter stands for one plain letter, and that it does so everywhere in the puzzle. Type it into the clue box above exactly as it appears. You can paste the whole printed line, words and all; only the pair of letters is read.

One fixed pair buys more than it looks. It takes a letter out of every choice the search has to make, and on a sentence this short that is usually the difference between an instant answer and a long hunt. If your paper prints two pairs, enter both and put a comma between them.

The direction matters. The letter on the left is the one printed in the puzzle; the letter on the right is what it really stands for. Read it the other way round and you have told the solver something untrue, and it will come back with nothing at all. If that happens, swap the two letters and solve again. How the different papers word this line is covered on the clue letter page.

Why the pun at the end is the hard part

A Cryptoquip is written to land on a joke, and jokes are built out of words a dictionary does not carry: a spelling invented for the occasion, a name, an ordinary word bent into meaning something else. This page proves its answers against an English word list, so the pun is often the one thing in the sentence it will not confirm.

That is not a failed solve, and you should not treat it as one. When a single word is off the list, the rest of the sentence normally pins nearly every letter of the alphabet anyway, and the key printed below the grid shows what each cipher letter stands for. Read the key across, write the last word in yourself, and the joke lands the way the setter meant it to.

How a Cryptoquip differs from a Cryptoquote

Both are the same cipher, and both obey the same rule: one letter stands in for another, consistently, from the first word to the last. What differs is the contents, and the contents change how a solver behaves.

A Cryptoquip is a single sentence, often eight to fourteen words, with no author line after it. There is less text, so there are fewer constraints for the search to lean on — which is precisely why the clue letter is supplied with it. A Cryptoquote is a whole quotation with a name at the end, half again as long or longer, and it is usually printed with no clue at all, because those extra words already do the same job. If the puzzle is new to you, what is a Cryptoquip starts from the beginning.

This page and the Cryptoquote solver share one engine and one dictionary; what differs is what each explains and what each expects you to have to hand. For a puzzle out of a book, a magazine or a puzzle-a-day calendar, with no clue and no quotation, the plain cryptogram solver is the one to use.

If nothing comes back

• The clue went in backwards. Much the commonest cause. Swap the two letters and solve again.
• The pun word is not in the dictionary. Expected on this puzzle. Look at the key: the letters you need are usually all there already.
• A letter stands for itself. Newspapers avoid it, which is why that rule is switched on above. Turn it off and try once more.
• One letter was mistyped. A single wrong letter gives a word a shape no English word has, and that turns the whole puzzle unsolvable rather than merely hard. Check the odd word against the paper.
• Only part of the puzzle was pasted. The more of the sentence it can see, the better it does. Give it every word.

About the Cryptoquip in your newspaper

The Cryptoquip is a syndicated feature of King Features Syndicate, and both its puzzles and its answers are their copyrighted work. We do not reprint them and we do not publish their solutions — not today’s, and not an archive of old ones. What this page gives you is a tool for the copy already in front of you. It is also why the work happens in your browser: on any day of the week, there is no copy of the puzzle on our side.

Everything else we have written about this puzzle — the clue letter, the format, the history — is collected on the Cryptoquip page.

Questions people ask