Clue: -
-
↓ decoded with the current shift ↓
-
Find the right letter shift
| Adjust the shift | Move every letter through the alphabet. |
| Read the clue | It describes the hidden word. |
Cipher Crack shows you a scrambled word and a clue. The scrambling is a Caesar cipher: every letter has been shifted the same number of places through the alphabet. Find the right shift and the word reveals itself. Julius Caesar really did use this to protect military messages.
It is the simplest cipher there is and the perfect introduction to codebreaking, because it can be cracked without any mathematics at all. There are only twenty-five possible shifts, so a determined person can simply try them in order, which is exactly why nobody has used it seriously for two thousand years.
Watch the short words and common letters. In English, E is the most frequent letter by a wide margin, so a shift that turns many symbols into E is usually the right one. That technique is called frequency analysis and it is how real codebreakers started.
Use the clue to narrow the answer before you finish shifting. If the clue points to something in a garden, you often only need one or two letters to fall into place before the whole word becomes obvious.
Try small shifts first. People choosing a Caesar cipher gravitate toward small numbers, and one, two and three are far more common than seventeen.
Look at the word shape. Double letters stay double under a Caesar shift, so a repeated symbol tells you the answer has a double letter, which rules out a great many possibilities immediately.
A code where every letter is shifted the same number of places through the alphabet. Shift A by three and it becomes D.
Twenty-five, which is why the cipher is easy to break by simply trying them all.
Using the fact that some letters appear more often than others. In English, E is the most common, which is a strong clue to the shift.
Yes, Julius Caesar used a shift cipher for military correspondence, which is where the name comes from.
No sign-up, no email, no account. Open the page and Cipher Crack is ready to play straight away, on a phone or a desktop.