What Is a Cryptoquote?

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

A cryptoquote is a quotation that has been put through a simple substitution cipher. Every letter of the original has been swapped for a different letter, consistently, all the way through. Your job is to work out the swap and read the quotation back. It has run in American newspapers for decades, usually beside the crossword, and it is one of the few puzzles that needs nothing but a pencil and a few minutes.

How the puzzle is built

Start with a quotation. Then shuffle the alphabet and use the shuffled version as a lookup table: every A in the quotation becomes whatever letter A was paired with, every B becomes whatever B was paired with, and so on. The important word is consistently. The same plain letter always produces the same cipher letter within a single puzzle, and it changes again tomorrow.

Two things are deliberately left alone:

• Word boundaries. The spaces stay where they are, which is why you can tell a one-letter word from a nine-letter one at a glance. This is the single biggest reason a cryptoquote is solvable by hand while a serious cipher is not.
• Punctuation. Commas, full stops and apostrophes are printed as they were. An apostrophe is the most useful free clue on the page.

Letter counts are preserved too. If the original had a doubled letter, the cipher has a doubled letter in the same place.

Where the name comes from

Cryptoquote is a newspaper feature name, not a technical term. The daily Cryptoquote is distributed to papers by King Features Syndicate, the Hearst-owned syndicate that also supplies a large share of American comic strips and puzzle features. It carries a King Features copyright line where it is printed, and no individual byline.

Cryptoquip, which many readers meet in the same papers, is a separate King Features feature with a different flavour: the hidden text is a pun or a joke rather than a quotation, and a clue letter is printed underneath. Celebrity Cipher, a third variant, is the work of Luis Campos and is distributed by a different syndicate. If you have ever wondered why your paper's cipher puzzle changed character when the paper changed its puzzle page, that is why: they are different features from different suppliers, not different days of the same one.

The differences are worth knowing if you solve more than one of them, and they are laid out side by side on our page comparing cryptogram, cryptoquote and cryptoquip.

What one looks like

Here is a cryptogram of the kind we publish. The quotation underneath the cipher is hidden until you ask for it.

Notice what the shape alone tells you before you decode anything: a one-letter word, an apostrophe with a single letter after it, a three-letter word that appears twice, and a first word whose last two letters are identical. That is four separate footholds, and none of them required a guess.

How to start solving one

The short version, in the order that actually works:

1. Take the one-letter words first. In English they are A or I, and nothing else.
2. Take the apostrophes next. A single letter after an apostrophe is nearly always S. Two letters are usually RE or VE.
3. Count the letters. The most frequent cipher letter is E more often than it is anything else. Treat the count as a shortlist rather than an answer.
4. Look for THE. A three-letter word that repeats and ends in your suspected E is THE, and it hands you three letters at once.
5. Push every letter you place through the whole puzzle, not just the word you found it in.

The long version, with a full worked example and the reasoning behind each move, is on our step-by-step guide to solving cryptograms.

Cryptoquote and the newspaper habit

Most people who solve these did not choose the puzzle so much as inherit it: it was in the paper their household took, next to the crossword, and it became part of the morning. That is also why the puzzle is so often described by the name of the paper it ran in rather than by its own name.

Papers have been thinning their puzzle pages for years, and a good many readers first go looking online because the feature they had done every day for twenty years simply stopped appearing. If that is how you got here, the page on newspaper cryptogram puzzles covers what tends to happen and what your options are.

Questions we get

Keep reading

• How to solve a cryptogramThe full method, step by step, with a worked example.
• Cryptogram vs cryptoquote vs cryptoquipThree names, one puzzle family. The differences that matter.
• Cryptogram rulesWhat the setter guarantees, and what that lets you assume.
• Newspaper cryptogram puzzlesWhich puzzle your paper runs, and what to do if it stops.
• Letter frequency chartFrequencies, short words and doubles, on one printable page.
• The daily archiveEvery past cryptogram, filed by year and month.