How to Solve a Cryptogram - Twitterati Cryptograms

hi I'm Tammy and I'm going to show you how to solve a cryptogram so a cryptogram is a single letter substitution Cipher which basically just means a code where one letter stands for another but a letter never stands for itself so for example this Q could theoretically be any letter in the alphabet except Q so your job is to figure out which letter it could be and once you figure that out you'll write it in for every instance of Q in the code so here there and so on and so forth but where do you start so I always say start in one of two places if you can either single letter words or find an apostrophe and figure out what the contractions might be we have two apostrophes here and one here and those are going to be a really good hint but let's start with the single letters first K is our code letter that indicates a single letter and there are only two single letter words in the English language a and I so you have about a 50/50% chance of figuring out which one is which but this will give you a clue which one it is think about how many times you see the letter i with an apostrophe when you're reading a book it comes up quite a bit you'll see I apostrophe D you'll see I apostrophe M so it's very common now think of about how many times you see a in that situation not much unless you live in California and you root for the Oakland A you don't really see it that often so I'm pretty confident that K is actually I so I'm going to go ahead and write that in above the letter all throughout the code so now we have the eyes filled in this letter as we talked about can be probably D or M but I'm not sure which one yet I'm not ready to make a commitment so I'm going to wait on that one let's instead look at this contraction um this is interesting because it's a contraction with two letters and we don't see very many of those either we see uh words with an apostrophe re e or we might see a word with an apostrophe V or double L's but this is not a Double L situation because these are two different letters so we're not sure which one it is but uh both of them end in e so it's likely that this m is actually an e now e is a very common letter to see in words so I'm just going to scan this puzzle see how many times M comes up and you'll see e is a pretty good guess for M there's a lot of them so let's go ahead and fill that in so now let's look at this a we're talking about whether it might be an re or a v let's see how many times a shows up in the code here there here now think about how many times you've seen a word that begins and ends with B I can't think of a single one but R that's definitely a possibility so I'm going to go ahead and guess R for a and fill that [Music] in continuing with this contraction let's think about what this word could be it's something with an R that's uh switched to the end of it um so it could be we are they are you are and that's about all I can think of at the moment um this is four-letter word here and so I'm thinking it's they and one way I might check my work is that um a common diaph which is a two-letter combination that you see a lot in Puzzles and just in in words in life is th so I might look in this puzzle and see are there any other words that have this GQ combination uh that that might be the or that or these or those or any form of the word there because that really comes up quite a bit so let's take a look for GQ there's one over there and that's the only one I see but I'm feeling pretty confident with the number of G's that I'm seeing that this is actually there so I'm going to fill in a t for every G an H for every Q and A Y for every o okay so now we're getting somewhere let's look at this word here it's just missing one letter and we know it's a vve right um and we've already used i and e so it can only be a o or U so that's got to be hate right so let's fill in an a for every L I hate it blank ey this is probably think right would you say it could be think but we're expecting action after I we want a verb so my guess would be uh think so let's fill in an N for every C and A K for every P all right so now I hate it when I think I hate it when so I'm thinking this is w and this is n all right now I'm ready to revisit this first contraction that we started with we're in the present tense here I hate it when I think so I'm thinking this is I am now let's take a look at this word this again we're missing a vowel we only have two left O and U so that's home let's take a look at this this is some kind of a verb right I hate it when I think I'm doing something right and very common to see um an ing in that situation which when you're doing something um and also I happen to see that there's a y here and G would work with this letter this would be get so I'm going to go ahead and and substitute a g for the Y's okay I think we know what's going on here right I hate it when I think I'm buying organic vegetables so let's fill that in I hate it when I think I'm buying organic vegetables but when I get home I discover they're just regular Donuts don't you hate it when that happens go out for organic vegetables and you come back with donuts so that's how you solve a cryptogram if you like this puzzle you can find more in the book Twitter cryptograms or Twitter cryptograms.org

Channel: Tammy Donroe

Views: 122,708

Keywords: iMovie

Id: 5y9THLG94SU

Length: 7min 4sec (424 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2016