Printable cryptogram guide
The cipher is not what makes a cryptogram hard.
Every simple substitution cipher is exactly as strong as every other, which is to say not at all against someone with a pencil. What decides whether a cryptogram takes four minutes or forty is the quotation underneath it, and that is the part most printable cryptogram sheets pick at random.
What you can make on this page
The builder produces packs of one to six cryptograms drawn from 96 quotations across six categories, printed one or two to a page on A4 or US Letter. Each sheet gives you a writing line above every cipher letter, an optional A to Z strip for recording the letters you have settled, and a matching answer key.
The controls that change how the sheet is used are the difficulty, which decides how much is filled in before you start, and the quote length. There is also a direct override for the number of letters given away, so a teacher who wants Hard quotations with three letters filled in can have exactly that. Name and date fields, a rules page, large print, and an ink-saving layout are optional, and answer keys are on by default.
Difficulty is how much grip the quote gives you, not how long it is
A cryptogram solver does not attack the cipher. They attack the text: the one-letter words, which in English are A or I; the two and three letter words, which are nearly always THE, AND, OF, TO, IS or IT; and the letters that repeat often enough to be E. A quotation full of those is a different puzzle from one built out of long uncommon words, whatever the cipher on top of it.
So this page measures three things on every quotation and lets the level choose its text as well as its hints.Foothold share is the proportion of words that are those short common ones.Repetition is letters divided by distinct letters, which is how often you get a second sighting of anything. Hint coverage is not how many letters are filled in but what share of the printed letters those hints uncover, because revealing E is worth about four times revealing V and a builder that counted hints would call the two the same help.
| Level | What it does | Letters filled in | Share of sheet uncovered | Short common words | Punctuation shown |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | Four letters are filled in, and the quote is one that leans on short common words | 4 | 47% | 54% of words | 2.7 marks |
| Medium | Two of the most-used letters are filled in to start you off | 2 | 27% | 45% of words | 2.7 marks |
| Hard | One middling letter is filled in, and the quote gives little else away | 1 | 9% | 29% of words | 1.2 marks |
| Expert | Nothing is filled in, and the punctuation is stripped out as well | 0 | 0% | 32% of words | 0.0 marks |
Measured from 30 generated sheets per level at build time, not typed in. Every one passed the answer-key check described below.
The same quote at both ends of the scale
Why Expert takes the commas away
Once every hint has been withdrawn there is nothing left to remove from a cryptogram except the punctuation, and the punctuation turns out to be worth removing. A comma is a phrase boundary. A full stop is a sentence end, so the word before it is often a noun and the word after it often starts a new clause. An apostrophe with a single letter after it is S or T and essentially nothing else, which on a quotation like the one above hands over a letter for free.
Dropping the marks is the standard way cryptogram books make a puzzle harder without making the quotation longer, and it is honest in a way that a longer quote would not be: Expert is not more reading, it is less help. The answer key still prints the quotation as its author punctuated it, because the point of the sheet is the sentence at the end of it.
Two rules that keep the sheet honest
No letter ever stands for itself. If E were enciphered as E, the puzzle would give a letter away by accident and, worse, would make an experienced solver reject the right answer, because cryptograms do not do that. Shuffling the alphabet and printing whatever comes out will not do: a plain shuffle leaves at least one letter in place 63% of the time, measured over twenty thousand shuffles of this engine's own generator, which is the classic one-minus-one-over-e result. Every cipher is repaired in a single pass, and any letter left sitting in place is swapped with a partner chosen so that neither position ends up fixed.
A lone letter never enciphers to A or I. A one-letter word in English is A or I, so a solver who sees a lone I on the page writes I above it without thinking. If the cipher happened to send A to I, that is ten minutes lost fighting a sentence that cannot come out. It is the one collision on a substitution cipher that reliably ruins an evening, and it costs nothing to exclude: the cipher is rejected and another is built.
How a cryptogram is actually solved
The method is worth stating because it is what the alphabet strip and the given letters are designed around. You are not looking for the key. You are looking for one word you can be sure of, and then following it.
- Read the one-letter words. Each is A or I, and which one usually falls out of the word after it.
- Count the letters. The most common is E about seventy per cent of the time; after that look at T and A.
- Attack three-letter words. A repeated three-letter word at the start of a phrase is almost always THE.
- Use the double letters. LL, SS, EE, OO and TT are common; QQ and JJ do not happen.
- Write every letter you settle everywhere it appears, then read what the crossings force.
| On the sheet | Times | Really | English order |
|---|---|---|---|
| Y | 12 | O | E |
| O | 6 | T | T |
| A | 5 | S | A |
| I | 3 | Y | O |
| U | 3 | N | I |
| X | 3 | L | N |
The quote bank, and what is deliberately missing from it
A cryptogram is a quotation with a cipher on it, so the quotations are the product. This one holds 96 of them from 52 named sources, and every one is out of copyright: authors who died well before 1929, works published before it, and traditional proverbs with no single author. That is what allows the terms of use to let anyone print, copy, and hand out these worksheets without asking.
It also means some very familiar names are not here. The best-known twentieth-century one-liners are still in copyright, and a site that gives away freely copyable worksheets cannot give away someone else's sentence with them. Quotations whose attribution is disputed are left out too, rather than printed with a hedge: a worksheet that teaches a misattribution is worse than a worksheet one quote shorter, and a great many of the lines that circulate under Mark Twain's and Abraham Lincoln's names were never written by either of them.
| Category | Quotes | Who is in it | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proverbs and sayings | 16 | English proverb, Traditional proverb, Spanish proverb, and others | Ages 9 and up |
| Classic literature | 16 | Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and others | Ages 12 and up |
| Philosophy and wisdom | 16 | Laozi, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and others | Ages 13 and up |
| Science and discovery | 16 | Marie Curie, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and others | Ages 12 and up |
| Courage and change | 16 | Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and others | Ages 11 and up |
| Nature and the seasons | 16 | John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others | Ages 10 and up |
Best printable cryptogram settings
| Use case | Recommended settings | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| First cryptogram, ages 9 to 11 | Proverbs, Easy, short quotes, alphabet strip on | Short sayings with familiar wording, and four letters already in, so the first word falls out quickly enough to keep them going. |
| History or English lesson | Courage and change, Medium, name and date on, 2 per page | The quotation is the lesson content, and the answer key page gives you the attribution to talk about afterwards. |
| Care home or large-print activity | Nature, Easy, large print, alphabet strip on, 1 per page | Large print raises the letter cells and the writing space together, and gentle quotations read well aloud when the sheet is finished. |
| Puzzle-club sheet | Mixed, Expert, long quotes, encipher the author | Nothing given, no punctuation, and an enciphered attribution that becomes a second short puzzle once the main one falls. |
| Substitute-teacher pack | Mixed, Medium, 6 puzzles, 2 per page, rules page on | Three sheets of work with the method printed on the front, and every puzzle in the pack has its own separate cipher. |
| Something to take on a journey | Philosophy and wisdom, Hard, 4 puzzles, answers on | One filled-in letter is enough to get in without making the sheet quick, and the key travels with the pack. |
Printing choices that matter
- One puzzle per page gives the biggest letter cells, which is what decides whether an adult can write in them comfortably. Two per page suits short and medium quotes.
- Large print is not just bigger type. It raises the cell width, which raises the writing space and the line spacing together, and that is the part that actually helps.
- The alphabet strip costs about half an inch of height. On a long quote at two per page the builder will tell you when that is the thing making the sheet cramped.
- Ink-saving drops the shaded panel behind the alphabet strip and prints the writing rules thinner. The cipher letters stay at full strength, because they are the part being read.
- Print the key separately if you are handing a pack out, because the key page carries every puzzle's answer.
Where this page is weaker than it looks
- There is no dictionary behind the builder, so it cannot promise that no other English sentence fits the same pattern. What it can do is keep every quotation above a length where that is vanishingly unlikely, which is why nothing under 36 letters is in the bank.
- Difficulty is measured, not guaranteed. A solver who happens to know the quotation will finish an Expert sheet faster than a stranger finishes an Easy one, and no engine can do anything about that.
- The bank is 96 quotes deep. A six-puzzle pack from one category will start repeating quotations across successive packs sooner than the word puzzles do, because a curated quotation is more work to add than a word.
- Frequency analysis, which the guide above recommends, is unreliable on a sheet of sixty letters. It is a nudge rather than a method at this length, and the table above shows it going wrong.
How this page is made and reviewed
Print Puzzles is part of the Hamilton Digital Media Limited puzzle network. This page is written and reviewed by Brian Hamilton and Karan Hamilton. The quote bank is compiled by hand, checked for copyright status and attribution, and the ciphers are generated and verified in your own browser rather than on a server, so the playable board and the printed sheet come from the same code. Read more about how we make puzzle packs, or tell us about a wrong attribution through the contact page.
Printable cryptogram FAQ
What is a cryptogram?
A quotation with every letter swapped for a different one, using the same swap all the way through. If E has become Q, then every E in the quotation is a Q, and your job is to work out which letter is standing in for which. It is a pencil puzzle rather than a code-breaking exercise: the quotation does the work, because English word shapes and letter frequencies give you enough to unpick it.
Where do the quotes come from, and can I print them for my class?
Every quotation in the bank is out of copyright, taken from authors who died well before 1929 or from traditional proverbs with no single author, and every one is attributed to a source you can check. That is why the worksheets can be printed, copied, and handed out freely under this site’s terms of use. It is also why some very famous twentieth-century lines are missing: they are still in copyright, and putting them on a freely copyable worksheet would not be ours to allow.
How do I start solving a cryptogram?
Find the one-letter words first, because in English they are A or I. Then take the short words: THE, AND, OF, TO, IS, IT and IN account for most two and three letter words on a page. Count the letters and try E, then T, then A on the most common ones. Once a letter is settled, write it in everywhere it appears before guessing the next, because it is the crossings that confirm or kill a guess.
Can a letter ever stand for itself?
No, and the builder guarantees it. If E were enciphered as E the puzzle would be handing you a letter by accident, and worse, it would make a solver reject the correct answer because cryptograms never do that. A plain shuffle of the alphabet leaves at least one letter in place about 63 per cent of the time, so this is repaired rather than hoped for.
What does the alphabet strip do?
It is the row of A to Z under the instructions, with a blank above each letter. As you settle a letter you write it in there, which stops you working the same letter out twice and shows at a glance which letters are still unspent. Letters that do not appear on that sheet at all are printed in grey so you know not to look for them.
Do the printable cryptograms come with answers?
Yes. Leave Answer keys selected and the PDF adds a key page after the worksheets with the full quotation, its attribution, and the letter key. The key lists only the letters that actually appear on that sheet, because a letter that never appears cannot be worked out from the puzzle and printing it would be describing the generator rather than the answer.
Are cryptograms good for older solvers and care homes?
They suit that audience better than almost any other printable puzzle: there is no grid to line up, no small handwriting required if you turn large print on, and the reward at the end is a quotation worth having read. Start on Easy with short quotes, keep the alphabet strip on, and turn large print on, which raises the letter cells and the writing space together rather than just the type size.