Letter frequencies against English, every Caesar shift tried at once, and every real word a cipher word could be. The substitutions are still yours to make — that is the part worth doing.
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Paste a cryptogram, a Caesar cipher, or any text you want counted.
This is the single most useful thing in cryptogram solving and almost nobody is taught it.
A substitution cipher changes which letters are used. It does not change where the repeats are. HELLO has the shape 0.1.2.2.3 — first letter, second, third twice, fourth — and whatever it is encrypted to will have exactly that shape.
So if you see WKH — three letters, none repeating — it could be the, and, for, or a few hundred others.
But MTTMOP, with letters two and three the same and one and four the same, matches only a handful of real words. That is a much better place to start guessing.
Click any cipher word above and every dictionary word with that shape comes back. Long words with repeats are the ones to click first — they have the fewest candidates.
E is 12.7% of English text and T is 9.1%, so the commonest letter in a cipher is usually one of those. In a long passage that holds up well.
In a short one it does not. A cryptogram of twenty words is far too small a sample for the distribution to settle, and a single unusual sentence can put Z near the top. Most published cryptograms are one or two sentences, which is precisely the range where frequency alone will send you down a wrong path with confidence.
Use it to rank guesses rather than to make them, and check each one against the word shapes. The amber line on each bar is where English would put that letter, so you are looking for the letters furthest from where they should be.
Try the Caesar shifts first
A surprising share of puzzle ciphers are a plain shift or ROT13. If one of the three shown above reads as English, you are finished.
Find the one-letter words
In English there are two: A and I. Every single-letter cipher word is one of them.
Then the three-letter word that appears most
It is almost always THE. That gives you three letters at once, and T, H and E are three of the four commonest letters in the language.
Then apostrophes
A letter after an apostrophe is S, T, D, M, LL, RE or VE. Contractions leak more than anything else in the text.
The frequency panel works on ordinary text too. It is how you check whether a pangram really uses every letter, how typesetters and puzzle constructors check letter distribution, and how you find out that your novel uses the letter K eleven times in four hundred pages.
For known positions rather than shapes, the pattern solver searches on letters you have confirmed. And the word cloud counts whole words rather than letters.
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