Printable Cryptograms

Every PDF ends with an answer key page. The easy set uses short proverbs such as “Many hands make light work.” The medium set has lines from Shakespeare, Alexander Pope and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the hard set has longer sentences from Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens and Emily Dickinson. The large print set has six easy puzzles, two to a page, with big letter boxes for seniors and anyone who prefers larger type.

1. Start with the short words. A one-letter word is almost always A or I. The most common three-letter word in English is THE, and AND comes next.
2. Look at apostrophes. A single letter after an apostrophe is usually S or T, as in IT’S or DON’T.
3. Count the letters. E, T, A and O are the most common letters in English, so the code letter that shows up most often is a good guess for E.
4. Watch for patterns. A doubled letter is often LL, EE, SS or OO, and a word ending in a repeated pair can be -ING or -ED.
5. Remember the rule. No letter ever stands for itself, and each code letter always means the same real letter, all the way through the puzzle.

On this page, a guess fills in every box with the same code letter at once, and two different code letters with the same guess turn orange so you can spot the mix-up. “Reveal a letter” fills in one more letter when you are stuck.

Cryptograms are a quiet, pencil-and-paper puzzle that feels a little like detective work, and the answer is a saying most people already know, which makes the last few letters satisfying to fill in. Start with the easy or large print set: the three letters given at the start are enough to see the first words appear. In a group, write one cryptogram on a whiteboard and solve it together, then talk about the proverb or the person who said it. For more, see our printable puzzles for seniors and brain games for seniors.

Secret alphabets like these are among the oldest codes there are. Edgar Allan Poe made them popular as a puzzle: in 1841 he challenged readers of Graham’s Magazine to send him ciphers to solve, and his story “The Gold-Bug” (1843) turns on cracking one. By the twentieth century the cryptogram had become a daily newspaper puzzle, next to the crossword.