5 Guaranteed Methods to Help Solve Cryptograms

you're right it's it's a Monday and you're also right we've never published anything on a Monday before but today is different today we're celebrating the fact that 10 cryptograms just went live in the cryptograms and coffee newsletter series and some people are new to cryptograms and others are just kind of warming up cryptograms after some time away from them so I thought it would be a good chance for us to take a a quick look back over those 10 cryptograms and see what we can learn from them after doing that I've come up with five lessons that we're going to be talking about here there's many more techniques that we have to solve cryptograms and we'll get to those eventually I'm sure but for today we're just going to focus in on what we've seen already in those first 10 puzzles tip number one look for your single letter words in English there's only two letters that can fit into a single letter word and that's a and I statistically they're about the same in terms of usage so it can be really tricky to see which is which you have a 50 50 chance of getting it right a word of caution though about those single letter word spots make sure you actually have a single letter word it's possible you might be tricked by an initial or something that is a single letter abbreviation for example tip number two this is apostrophes and understanding how they work we haven't seen all the cases around apostrophes yet in these first 10 puzzles the ones that we've seen are the easier ones the more common ones for example we have an S the possessive s after an apostrophe very common the other option is a t if there's a t there the letter prior to the apostrophe is going to be an n in general you'll see more possessive s's than you will tease tip number three this is about patterns patterns that help us get into puzzles that might otherwise be difficult to get into we're talking about puzzles that have no single letter word but do have patterns that we can use and a pattern is basically using the frequencies that we'd expect to see in typical English to figure out what words are three letter words in particular are great candidates for this because the very most commonly used word in the English angle in the English language is the word the and we can identify that because the very first letter and the last letter of this word are very commonly used letters and the one in the middle not so much so if you see a pattern with a high use letter a not so much newsletter and another high use letter that's probably going to be the word the another common three-letter word is the word and and that is a different pattern altogether you start out with a very common word the middle one is slightly less common than that it's you know and is still a very common letter but not as much as a and then D is not used as much so you see the steady decrease as you move along with those letters so a very common first letter last common second letter and even less for the third during this set of puzzles we also saw how we can use patterns to identify the word that t-h-a-t the pattern itself is a lot like what we're looking for when we see the word the we have a th at the beginning of that we have a th at the beginning of the we have a gap one letter in the middle and then we have that same letter repeating on the end so the first and last letter will be the same and the way I like to use this is as a quality check I guess you could say if I'm seeing a three letter word that might look like the word the and I'm also seeing a another word down further that might look like that not just in the case of one word but in the case of two so it can make you feel more confident there were eight puzzles out of the first ten that featured the word the in it and that we can use this pattern to identify similarly there are eight puzzles with the word and in it so using a pattern looking for the word the looking for the word and will help you get into the puzzle another interesting tip here is the use of a question mark now we've only seen this in one of our puzzles that tells us one important thing somewhere in this puzzle if there's a question mark there will be a question word of who what why when or where in this puzzle and it can really help us focus in and solve um you know at least a three letter word or bigger the last tip I have for you is to remember that this is a puzzle it is going to be challenging it's meant to be challenging the joy is coming from the unraveling of the mystery you know solving the puzzle and figuring out the answer so don't expect to get everything right the first time and also just get in and start making changes because the longer you stare at a puzzle on paper or on the computer screen the longer it's going to take you to solve the puzzle it's a good idea just to go in and try something use some of the techniques that we've just talked about to try to get into this puzzle and solve it that way fully expect that you might have to go back and change things there's nothing wrong with that that's just how this works so those are my top five tips from the first 10 cryptograms and the cryptograms and coffee newsletters in the future if you'd like to see videos like this one where we break things down and highlight specific skills that you can use to make things easier for you in the future that's great let me know that you'd like to see content like this also if you're not a newsletter subscriber feel free to do that at our website links are in the YouTube descriptions all of the puzzles that we played so far are here on YouTube too so if you're not a member you can play all the first 10 puzzles that we're looking at here and uh have yourself created

Channel: Cryptograms and Coffee

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Id: e2UGbOAFEyY

Length: 6min 44sec (404 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023