How to solve cryptograms and cryptoquotes

What you are actually solving

A cryptoquote is a simple substitution cipher. Each letter of the alphabet has been swapped for another letter, and the swap is the same all the way through: if coded Z means E once, it means E everywhere. Spaces, apostrophes, commas and full stops are left alone, so you always know how long each word is and where the contractions are.

Unquote adds two rules worth remembering. First, no letter ever stands for itself, so coded R can never be plain R, which often settles a late choice between two candidates. Second, you get one letter free when you press Start. We choose it from the letters that appear at least twice in the quotation, and never the most common one, so it is a foothold rather than a giveaway. Before you start you also see whether the line comes from a film, a TV show, a book or a play, its year, and how many words and letters it has.

Letter frequency: useful, but only at the top

English letters in order of frequency start E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, L, U, often remembered as ETAOIN SHRDLU. Over a long text that order is reliable; over a quotation of fifty letters it is only a hint.

So use frequency for the top of the table only: treat the most common coded letter as a strong candidate for E, with T, A and O behind it, and let the short words do the rest.

• Where a letter sits in a word matters as much as how often it appears. T is the most common first letter of English words in running text, because of THE, THAT, THIS and THEY. A, O, S and W also start many words.
• E, S, D, T, N and Y are very common last letters. A coded letter that ends four or five different words is usually one of those.
• A coded letter that turns up in the middle of many short words is probably a vowel.

Short words do the heavy lifting

One letter

A one-letter word is A or I. If the quotation has two different one-letter coded words, you have both of them at once and only need to decide which is which. I is the more likely to begin a sentence and to sit before an apostrophe (I'M, I'D, I'LL, I'VE).

Two letters

Two-letter words come from a short list: OF, TO, IN, IT, IS, BE, AS, AT, SO, WE, HE, BY, OR, ON, DO, IF, ME, MY, UP, AN, GO, NO, US, AM. The useful trick is to look for a two-letter word that shares a letter with a three-letter word. TO and THE share a T at the start. IT, IS and IN share their first letter. OF, ON and OR share an O. One shared letter between two short words usually settles both.

Three letters

THE and AND are the most common three-letter words, followed by the likes of FOR, YOU, NOT, ARE, BUT, WAS, HIS, HER, CAN, ALL and ONE. A three-letter coded word that appears twice is very likely THE.

Apostrophes give away whole words

Film and TV lines are full of contractions, and the letters around an apostrophe come from a tiny set.

• After the apostrophe: S, T, D, M, RE, VE or LL. One letter after it is S, T, D or M; two letters is RE, VE or LL.
• Apostrophe-T almost always follows N, as in DON'T, CAN'T, WON'T, ISN'T and DIDN'T. Find one N'T word and you have N and T together.
• A single coded letter before an apostrophe is nearly always I: I'M, I'D, I'LL, I'VE.
• Watch for an apostrophe at the start of a word too. Unquote No. 3 ended "thrust upon 'em", and O'CLOCK keeps its apostrophe after the O.

Doubled letters and pattern words

A doubled coded letter is a doubled plain letter, and only a handful of doubles are common: LL, EE, SS, OO, TT and FF lead the way, with RR, NN, PP and CC behind them. At the end of a word, a double is most often LL, SS, EE or FF, as in WILL, LESS, FREE and OFF.

Pattern words go one better. Write down which positions in a coded word repeat, and match the pattern rather than the letters. Unquote No. 1 contained the coded word JYQJKY. Its first and fourth letters match, and so do its second and sixth: that pattern is PEOPLE, and very little else. Other patterns worth knowing:

• First and last letters the same, four letters long: THAT is the commonest by far.
• Third and fifth letters the same, five letters: THERE and WHERE.
• Second and fourth the same, five letters: NEVER and SEVEN.
• A double in the middle with the first letter repeated: LITTLE.
• Five letters starting and ending in the same letter: GOING, if the middle has a vowel and an N.

Worked example: Unquote No. 21

This is the real puzzle from 30 October 2026, so it is safe to spoil. Before Start, the game said it was from a TV show, from 1972, with 12 words. The cipher was:

G HJGRA JZ'M WKGRW HK PZ CYZZ CKY Q XZYN FKRW HGEZ.

The free letter was coded W, which is plain G. Here is how it falls.

1. There are two different one-letter words, G and Q, so between them they are A and I.
2. WKGRW is a five-letter word that starts and ends in G, with coded G in the middle. If G is I, the word reads G?I?G, and GOING fits perfectly. That gives G = I, K = O and R = N, and so Q = A.
3. Count the coded letters. Z appears six times, more than any other, including a double at the end of CYZZ. Z is E.
4. HJGRA now reads ??IN?. HK reads ?O, so H is likely T, S or D. With H as T, the word is T?IN?. THING is out because plain G is already taken by coded W, which leaves THINK. So J = H and A = K.
5. JZ'M reads HE' plus one letter. The only sensible contraction is HE'S, so M = S.
6. CYZZ is ??EE and CKY is ?O?. They share coded C and Y. FREE and FOR fit both, giving C = F and Y = R. XZYN is then ?ER?, which is VERY.
7. PZ is ?E after TO, so TO BE. FKRW is ?ONG after VERY, so LONG, and HGEZ is TI?E at the end, so TIME.

The answer: "I think he's going to be free for a very long time." It is Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served? Notice that frequency did just one job, finding E; the short words and the GOING pattern did the rest.

Hints and checks: the arithmetic

Unquote takes 1 point off for every two seconds, so the costs convert neatly into time. A hint costs 100 points, which is the same as 200 seconds, or 3 minutes 20. A wrong Check costs 25 points, the same as 50 seconds. Stuck for a few minutes with no way in? The hint is usually cheaper.

A hint always fills in the most frequent coded letter that you do not yet have right, and that includes letters you have filled in wrongly. On No. 21 a first hint would have given you E, because Z was the most common letter. That makes a hint a useful diagnostic: if it lands on a letter you thought you had, you know where the solve went wrong. Hinted letters and the free letter are locked, so you cannot overwrite them by accident.

If you give the same plain letter to two coded letters, the game marks the clash, so fix those before checking, and read the whole quotation through once first: a sentence that does not quite make sense usually hides one swapped pair.

Quick checklist

• Note the category, year and word count before you start.
• Place the free letter and look at every word it appears in.
• Settle the one-letter words (A and I) and any apostrophe words.
• Find the most common coded letter and test it as E.
• Look for shared letters between two- and three-letter words.
• Match doubled letters and repeated-letter patterns.
• Remember no letter stands for itself.
• Stuck for more than about three minutes? A hint is cheaper than the clock.

Ready to try it? Play today's Unquote, read the Unquote rules and scoring if you have not played before, or practise on finished puzzles in the Unquote answers archive. If quotations are your thing, Marquee and Prompter come at them from different angles.