Cryptoquote Solver

Length is what makes a Cryptoquote come out

Every word you hand the solver rules out readings of every other word, because a cipher letter has to stand for the same plain letter everywhere in the puzzle. A quotation of a dozen words or more stacks up so many of those constraints that, in practice, exactly one reading of the whole sentence survives them. That is why a Cryptoquote usually comes back in well under a second, and why it seldom needs any hint from you at all.

The reverse is true of very short puzzles. Cut the same quotation down to four or five words and several perfectly good English sentences may fit what is left; when that happens this page lists them all, best first, and leaves the choice to you. So paste the whole quotation rather than the line you are stuck on — the words you have already worked out are the ones that settle the words you have not.

The name at the end

Most Cryptoquotes name their author, and that name is enciphered along with everything else. Proper nouns are in no English dictionary, so the solver will not claim one: it proves the sentence and leaves the name showing gaps.

That is a finished result, not a failure. Look at the key below the grid, where each cipher letter sits above the letter it stands for, and read the name off one letter at a time. Nine times in ten it is somebody you recognise before you are halfway through it. If two or three letters of the name never appeared anywhere in the quotation, they are the only ones you will have to guess, and the shape of the name will normally tell you.

You usually do not need a clue letter

There is a clue box above, but most papers run the Cryptoquote without a clue: the sentence is long enough to do that job by itself. The Cryptoquip is the one that arrives with a printed letter, because it is short and its ending is a pun rather than a statement. If your paper does print a pair under your Cryptoquote, by all means enter it — it costs nothing and it finishes sooner.

The Cryptoquip solver covers that puzzle and how to enter its clue the right way round. For something out of a puzzle book or a magazine, with neither a quotation nor a clue, the plain cryptogram solver is the page to use. All three run one engine and share one dictionary, so any of them will take any of these puzzles.

If nothing comes back

• The wording is older than the dictionary. Quotations from a century or two back use spellings a modern word list does not carry. The solver reports the letters it proved, and the rest generally reads itself.
• The author’s name is the only gap. Expected, as above. Read it off the key rather than treating it as an error.
• A letter was mistyped. One wrong letter gives a word a shape no English word has, and the puzzle becomes unsolvable rather than hard. Compare the odd word with the paper.
• A letter stands for itself. Rare in a newspaper, which is why that rule is on above, but puzzles from other sources do not always follow it. Turn the box off and solve again.
• Only part was pasted. Half a quotation gives the search half its constraints. Give it the whole sentence, punctuation and all.

About the Cryptoquote in your newspaper

The Cryptoquote that runs in American papers is a syndicated feature of King Features Syndicate, and both the puzzles and their solutions are copyrighted. We do not reprint them, and we post neither today’s answer nor an archive of past ones. This page is a tool for the copy you already have. It never takes a copy of its own, either: the search happens in your browser, not on a machine of ours.

If you arrived looking for the printed solution, today’s Cryptoquote answer sets out what we can offer instead and how long it takes.

Questions people ask