Cryptogram
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Encrypted text.
"It's a big help in solving cryptograms if you know how a cryptogram is constructed. The constructor normally uses two alphabets, one for plaintext, one for the substitute cipher letters."
- 2 a piece of writing in code or cipher wordnet
- 3 A type of word puzzle in which text encoded by a simple cipher is to be decoded.
"You already know this if you are an amateur codebreaker. On the comics pages of many newspapers, you will find a little puzzle known as a cryptogram. It's usually a famous quotation that has been encrypted in a very straightforward way […]"
Example
More examples""My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.""
Etymology
From crypto- + -gram.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.