Printable cryptograms
Free printable cryptograms
A proverb hidden in a letter substitution cipher. Work out one letter and the rest starts to fall. 36 to print, or build your own.
- Easy cryptogram 12 puzzles. Longer sayings with several letter hints given. More text means more repeated letters, which is what gives a solver a way in.
- Medium cryptogram 12 puzzles. Shorter sayings and fewer hints. You will need to spot the one and two letter words before the rest opens up.
- Hard cryptogram 12 puzzles. Short sayings with no hints at all. Little text means few patterns, so these take patience.
How a cryptogram works
Every letter of the saying has been swapped for a different one, and the same swap is used throughout: if E became Q once, it is Q everywhere. Nothing is hidden beyond that, so the puzzle is entirely solvable by looking at patterns.
The way in is short words. A single letter standing alone is almost always A or I. A three-letter word that turns up repeatedly is usually THE. Double letters are worth finding early, and an apostrophe followed by one letter is nearly always S or T. From three or four confident letters the rest tends to fall out quickly.
Length is what makes one harder than another, which is why these pages are banded by it. A long saying repeats its letters often enough to give you a foothold; a short one barely repeats at all, so there is less to reason from. Hints trade difficulty for a starting point: the easy sets give three letters, the hard sets none.
The sayings are proverbs rather than famous quotations, deliberately. A proverb needs no attribution and there is none to get wrong, and a misattributed quotation is exactly the kind of error a classroom sheet must not carry.
Questions about printable cryptograms
- What is a cryptogram?
- A short piece of text with every letter swapped for another, using the same swap throughout: if E became Q once, it is Q everywhere. You solve it by spotting patterns rather than by guessing, which is why word length and repeated letters matter more than vocabulary.
- How do you start solving a cryptogram?
- Short words. A single letter standing alone is A or I. A repeated three-letter word is usually THE, which hands you three of the most common letters at once. After that, look for doubled letters, which in English are most often LL, EE, SS, OO, TT or FF.
- Are these cryptograms free to print with answers?
- Yes. Each difficulty is a printable set with the solutions, and you can download a single puzzle as a PDF. The sayings are proverbs rather than famous quotations, so there is no attribution to get wrong on a classroom sheet.
- What makes a cryptogram hard?
- Length, mostly. A long saying repeats its letters often enough to give you a foothold; a short one barely repeats at all, so there is less to reason from. Hints are the second lever: the easy sets give three letters, the hard sets none.