TEA Tutorial

1.6 Solving cryptograms

When solving cryptograms you may know that certain letters in a word are the same, but have no idea which letter is involved. You can include "letter variables" in patterns to help with situations like this: letter variables (represented by one of the digits 0 to 9) can be replaced by any letter; but whatever letter is chosen must be used consistently within the word.

Suppose you were trying to solve this cryptogram based on a famous quotation:

GURER JNF ARIRE LRG CUVYBFBCURE GUNG PBHYQ RAQHER GUR GBBGUNPUR CNGVRAGYL

TEA can help you identify possible replacements for words containing repeated letters, especially long ones with more than one repeated letter. For example, GBBGUNPUR has three repeated letters. Replacing these with the letter variables 1 and 2 and 3 in a TEA template will suggest potential words:

Step 6 initial image

Type 12213..3. into the box below the Pattern label and click on the Word Search button. You should see that TEA finds several possible words: note that in each case the letters replacing 1 and 2 are the same within a word, although they can be different for different words.

In this case, toothache seems the most likely candidate and that gives a feasible pattern .h..o.o.he. for CUVYBFBCURE. TEA template matching (see Step 1) reveals philosopher as the most likely word. It doesn't take long to decode the cryptogram as this quotation (from Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing):

There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently

Another common use for letter variables is to find words with unusual properties, such as palindromes (e.g. deified can be found with the pattern 1234321) and tautonyms (e.g. couscous can be found with the pattern 12341234).

Letter variables can also be used in the anagram part of a pattern and the example below illustrates this by finding pair isograms (also known as diplograms) in which each letter is used exactly twice:

Step 6 final image

Type ;1122334455 into the box below the Pattern label and click on the Word Search button. Each ten-letter word that appears should be a pair isogram: as with letter variables in templates, each variable is consistently replaced with the same letter; because they are in an anagram pattern, the letter pairs can appear anywhere in the word.

Note that by default each letter variable in a pattern must match a different letter in the word. This means, for example, that the palindromic word Malayalam wouldn't be displayed for the pattern 123454321, because both 2 and 4 have to equate to A for that to work. If you want to allow letter variables to equate to the same letter, use the Tools|Options... command, click on the Pattern tab and uncheck the Exclusive letter variables setting.

In the next step, we'll learn how macros help you abbreviate commonly used sequences in patterns.

Relevant Help Sections

Letter Variables
Options Pattern Tab