What Is a Cryptoquip?

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

A cryptoquip is a daily newspaper puzzle in which a short joke has been hidden behind a letter-for-letter substitution cipher. Every letter of the joke has been swapped for a different letter, the same way all the way through, and your job is to work out the swap and read the joke back. Two things set it apart from every other cipher puzzle on the page: the paper prints one clue letter to start you off, and the sentence you are digging for is a pun.

Who publishes it

Cryptoquip is a feature name, not a general term for the puzzle type. The daily Cryptoquip is supplied to newspapers by King Features Syndicate, the Hearst-owned syndicate behind a large share of American comics and puzzle features. Where it is printed it carries a King Features copyright line and no individual byline, which is why you can read it for thirty years without ever learning who writes it.

That copyright line matters for anyone looking for answers online. The puzzle and its solutions belong to the syndicate, so a site that reprints yesterday's cryptoquip and its answer is republishing someone else's property. We do not do that. What we can do is explain the puzzle, give you a tool that breaks the one in your hand, and set our own puzzles from scratch.

The clue letter printed underneath

Under the puzzle, most papers run a line like Today's Cryptoquip clue: D equals C. No other cipher puzzle on the page does this, and it is the fastest way to tell a cryptoquip from anything else.

What it means is simple. The letter on the left is one of the letters actually printed in the puzzle. The letter on the right is what it really stands for. So that line is telling you to write a C above every D in the grid, before you have solved anything at all.

It is worth more than one letter looks like it should be. A cipher key pairs letters off one to one, so fixing one pair also rules that pair out everywhere else. The full account of how much a single clue is worth, and the mistake nearly everyone makes with it, is on our page about what a printed clue like D equals C means.

The answer is a pun, and that changes how you finish

The other half of the name is the important half. A quip is a joke, and the hidden sentence in a cryptoquip is written to land on a pun: a word doing double duty, a phrase bent one letter out of shape, a bad rhyme. That is the point of the feature. It is also, in practice, the hardest part of solving one.

Here is why it matters at the table. On an ordinary cryptogram, the last stretch solves itself: once you have most of the words, you read the sentence in your head and your ear supplies the rest. A pun is built to defeat exactly that. The final word will not be the word that sense predicts, because if it were, it would not be funny. So the technique that finishes every other puzzle on the page is the technique that fails here, and solvers who do not know that assume they have made a mistake and start over.

Three practical consequences:

Finish the punchline letter by letter, not by ear. Trust the letters you have already placed even when the word forming under them looks wrong.
Expect the last word to be odd. A mangled word, an invented word or a name is a normal ending for this puzzle, not a sign of an error.
Watch for a repeated block of letters near the end. Puns often rhyme, and a cipher keeps spelling intact, so a rhyme shows up as two words sharing a run of identical cipher letters. That repeat is usually the joke itself, and it is a free foothold.

What one looks like

Here is a puzzle of our own, built the way a cryptoquip is built. The clue is O equals D, and the answer is hidden until you ask for it.

SRVZFMVDDVSHDVOZVJFYNVRVRFOXHGFQQBEFOVVGUYCROUYCR.

Show the answer

THE BAKER RETIRED BECAUSE HE HAD FINALLY MADE ENOUGH DOUGH.

— Our own puzzle, not a syndicated one.

Look at the last two words before you decode anything. VGUYCR and OUYCR end in the same four letters. That is the rhyme showing through the cipher, and it tells you the joke is a sound joke before you know a single word of it. The clue you were given, O equals D, sits inside the final word, which is where a cryptoquip clue often lands.

How to start solving one

If you have never finished one, this is the order that works:

Write the clue in everywhere first. Go through the whole puzzle and put the clue letter above every copy of its partner. Ten seconds, and the shape of the sentence changes.
Take the short words next. One-letter words are A or I. A three-letter word that shows up twice is very often THE, and that hands you three letters at once.
Push every letter you place all the way through. A letter you work out in one word is the same letter in all the others. Most beginners solve a word, stop, and lose the momentum.
Use doubled letters and word endings. Doubles are usually LL, EE, SS, OO or TT. A three-letter ending repeated across several words is often ING.
Leave the joke until last, and expect it to be silly. Get every other letter placed, then let the punchline assemble itself out of what is left.

That is the short version. The full method, with frequency counts, apostrophes and a worked example taken from start to finish, is in our step-by-step guide to solving cryptograms. If you would rather have the answer than the method, the cryptoquip solver runs entirely inside your own browser: nothing is uploaded, and there is a field for the clue letter.

Cryptoquip, cryptoquote, cryptogram

All three words get used for the same puzzle, and only one of them is really a puzzle type. Cryptogram is the general term for any message hidden behind a substitution cipher. Cryptoquote and Cryptoquip are two particular newspaper features that use it: one hides a quotation, the other hides a joke.

The mechanics are identical, so anything you learn on one works on the others. The differences are editorial, and they are set out line by line, with a table, on our page comparing cryptogram, cryptoquote and cryptoquip. If it is the quotation feature you actually solve, start instead with what a cryptoquote is.

What we publish, and what we do not

We set our own puzzles from quotations that are in the public domain, print the source we checked each one against, and publish our own answers on the same page. We do not reprint the syndicated Cryptoquip or Cryptoquote, and we do not publish their answers. A new puzzle goes up here every morning and stays up for good in the archive. Everything else we have on this puzzle is gathered on the cryptoquip page.

Questions we get

Is a cryptoquip the same as a cryptoquote?

No. They are two different daily features from the same syndicate. A cryptoquip hides a joke and prints a clue letter. A cryptoquote hides a real quotation and names the speaker, with no clue letter. The puzzles are solved the same way; what changes is the kind of sentence you are digging for. There is a full side-by-side comparison on our page on cryptogram vs cryptoquote vs cryptoquip.

What does "Today's Cryptoquip clue: D equals C" mean?

It means that every D printed in the puzzle stands for a C. The first letter is the one you can see; the second is the one you write above it. Fill in all of them before you do anything else. Our page on the clue letter goes through it in detail.

Why is the answer always a joke?

Because that is what the feature is. The name is short for a quip, and the sentence is written to end on a pun. It is not a sign that you have solved it wrong when the last word turns out to be a groaner.

Do you publish the answer to today's newspaper cryptoquip?

No. That puzzle belongs to King Features Syndicate, and printing its answers would be printing their work. We give you a solver that works out the puzzle in your hand without anyone reprinting anything, plus our own puzzles, which are ours to publish.

Can a letter stand for itself?

In the puzzles we set, never: it is ruled out when the cipher is built, which quietly removes one candidate from every square. Syndicated newspaper puzzles do not all make that promise, so treat it as a bonus rather than a rule you can lean on.