I love doing Cryptoquote puzzles. I started doing them when I was a kid, watching my mother do them, to the point where it became a race to see who could get to the Crytoquote in the newspaper first, me or her. I just think that they are more fun than regular crossword puzzles, quite possibly because there is no repetition. When you’re doing Cryptoquotes, or Crytograms in general, each puzzle uses a different code. Grab a crossword puzzle book sometime and do a few; you’ll see a lot of the same clues reused for each puzzle, with the same stupid answers. (“One who imitates” = “aper?” Yeah, there’s a common term.) My favorite has to be when they give a clue, and then put “(var.)” after it, meaning the answer is not spelled correctly. This is not a “variation,” it means “I had some letters I couldn’t make fit into the puzzle. Deal with it.”
Crytograms, for those who don’t do them, are puzzles where a sentence or phrase is coded using letter substitution. You have to figure out the code so you can translate the puzzle. For example, DZO might stand for AND or THE. A Crytoquote is a Crytogram that is a quote of someone famous. In my opinion, Cryptoquotes are easier than a Cryptograms – the main difference is that Crytoquotes are a quote, and often include the name of the person who said it, so halfway through solving it you may recognize the quote. If you at least recognize the name of the source, that helps out a lot for filling in letters. Crytograms, onion other hand, can be ANYTHING. For example, one puzzle I just did shows a state with a star on it, and then has a writeup of that location. If you know your geography then you’re one step ahead, but if you don’t recognize the place then you have to rely on the usual rules.
I get asked a lot, how are you able to do those? To some people, it’s just a jumble of letters, but to me, they are patterns. I guess I am so used to doing them that my mind immediately starts looking for the common letters to form words. Before anyone starts casting for Beautiful Mind II, there IS a set of rules that make solving these things a lot easier.
1. Look for single letters. A and I are the only two single letter words in the English Language, so if you see a single letter, it has to be one of those. (In rare cases, it might be O, especially when quoting someone from the Middle Ages, or some religious passage.) Occasionally you’ll luck out and the code letter will be A or I – since a letter never stands for itself, it has to be the other one. If you see both and have to figure out which is which, one way to tell is to look for other words that end in one of those letters. There are very few words that end in I, but many that end in A. Also look for word combinations – “P QS Q SQB LZJ …” looks weird, but if you examine it carefully you see that Q is repeated in such a way that would make it impossible to stand for I – if Q is I, then P has to be A, and I don’t know of any phrases that would fit. So replace I for P and A for Q, and you get: I A* A *A* LZJ …” (the … meaning there are words after this pattern. Sometimes it’s easier to look at small groups of words rather than the puzzle as a whole.) So, given that S is also repeated, what letter can you put there that makes sense?
2. Look for commonly used letters. E is the most commonly used letter. Here is the alphabet, in order of most commonly used in words: e t a o i n s r h l d c u m f p g w y b v k x j q z. So if you see a letter repeated a lot, it’s probably one of the first 3 or 4 on that list.
3. Look for commonly used words. The top 25 words in order of commonality are: the of and to in a is that be it by are for was as he with on his at which but from has this. If you see a word repeated often, try one of those. Three letter words repeated are typically going to be THE, AND, or ARE. Two letter words can be very helpful when there are a number of them in a row. UQ UB LAB could be “IS IT NOT.”
4. Look for words with repeating letter patterns. If there are multiple long words that end in the same three letters, it could be ING. A pattern of AMQAYM is “PEOPLE.” BQMB is usually “THAT,” especially if you see BQW somewhere else in the phrase (which would make that “THE.” OQNZQQK is most likely “BETWEEN.” PQYKYSYI is probably “WHENEVER.” If you see a word of DHN and then elsewhere in the puzzle you see DHNAN, DHN is “THE” and DHNAN is either “THESE” or “THERE.” Same goes for THOSE and THEIR.
5. Proper words like names of people or places are typically marked, so you know that those are not going to follow standard rules.
6. Look for words with apostrophes, as these are typically contractions which would make the last letters N’T. It could also be ‘S, so look for other words to back up your assumption: if you have a word like ZPQ’W and you see QPW somewhere else, you have DON’T and NOT.
7. A letter will be the same throughout a puzzle. Unless otherwise stated, every puzzle uses its own cypher, so if G = R in one puzzle, it is not the same in the next one. An exception would be word lists, such as “Things you find in Florida.” Each of the items in that list will hold the same code, but the next list will most likely different.
Of course if you’re working a puzzle marked “Expert” or “Challenger” then all the above rules go out the window. The guy who wrote the puzzle knows damn well that you’re relying on those rules, so they will purposely pick a phrase that doesn’t fall into any of those categories. When that happens, it falls to guesswork. 🙂