Exponology Apps · Newspaper cryptograms · desk edition
Fill in the blanks, one letter at a time.
CipherDesk — fill in the blanks. Each letter stands for another letter (never itself). Every puzzle is a quote hidden behind a substitution cipher: work out which cipher letter stands for which real letter, and the quote — and its author — appears.
App home — exponology.com/apps/cipherdesk/app.html →
A taste of CipherDesk
A puzzle, solved
This is a real CipherDesk puzzle, solved in the app: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” — Groucho Marx. Every guess is in place, the substitution map is complete, the author is revealed under the board, and the “Solved! Well done.” banner is on top. In the app, every puzzle ends like this — a hidden quote, and the person it belongs to.
What it does
The newspaper puzzle, kept on a desk
-
Every puzzle is a quote
Solve the cipher and you don’t just fill a grid — you uncover a saying and the person it’s attributed to, with a “Solved! Well done.” banner when the last letter falls.
-
The map remembers so you don’t have to
A guess appears everywhere its cipher letter appears, and the substitution map at the side holds all 26 pairings — plus a Hints given list, so a revealed letter is never lost.
-
Help that gives away one letter, not the puzzle
Hint reveals a single letter — the most frequent one you haven’t got right yet. Check marks only the wrong letters, so you can fix them and keep solving.
-
Bring your own cryptogram
Found one in a newspaper or a book? Paste the ciphertext in and solve it on the desk. Or type a solution of your own and let Scramble turn it into ciphertext for someone else.
-
Your saved puzzles keep a home
Puzzles you paste or scramble are kept in a Saved library, linked to a saved-puzzles.json file you can also download a copy of — so the collection is a file you hold, not a list trapped in the page.
How it works
Three steps from cipher to quote
Pick a tab, tap New
Choose All, Saved, or a subject — Wisdom, Science, Leadership, Wit, History, Sports or Comedy — then tap New. A quote is dealt and encoded with a fresh cipher, and the timer starts with your first guess.
Fill in the blanks
Tap a cipher letter and enter your guess. It fills in everywhere that letter appears; the map updates with it, and the frequency under each cipher letter hints at the common letters — E, T, A — hiding in the text.
Hint, check, and finish
Stuck? Hint reveals one letter and logs it under Hints given. Check marks your wrong letters, Undo steps back a guess, and Reset clears them all. When every letter matches, the author is revealed and the timer stops.
The features
Everything on the desk, button by button
Nothing here is decorative — each row is a control in the app, doing what it says.
Substitution map
All 26 cipher → plain pairings, always in view.
Every guess you make — and every hint you take — lands on the map, with a Hints given list underneath it. One plain letter can’t stand for two cipher letters: assigning it moves it.
Hint · Check · Reset · Undo
Hint reveals one letter. Check marks wrong letters in red. Reset clears all your guesses. Undo takes back the last one.
Hints and Check need a known solution — built-in and online puzzles always have one, and a pasted puzzle has one if you keep its solution (see Paste, below).
Timer · Dark mode · Print
The timer runs while you solve and stops when you finish. The moon button switches to a dark desk. Print puts just the puzzle — blanks, cipher letters, and the one rule — on paper.
Print hides the keyboard, toolbar, categories and map, so the sheet reads like the newspaper version.
Where puzzles come from
71 reviewed quotes in the current library.
New deals from the reviewed library — a snapshot of quotes the app carries with it (quotes.json, with a copy built into the page). If the snapshot can’t be reached, it deals from a built-in fallback set instead, so a puzzle is always there.
Paste & Scramble
Paste ciphertext — or type a solution and scramble it.
Paste a cryptogram from a newspaper or book and load it as a puzzle. Or type the solution, click Scramble solution, and CipherDesk encodes it into ciphertext. Keeping the solution is optional — keep it, and Check can mark wrong letters on that puzzle too.
Saved library
Your pasted and scrambled puzzles, in the Saved tab.
Link the library once to its file — ~/Downloads/CipherDesk/saved-puzzles.json — and the app loads it and updates it in place. A Download copy button is there when you want a separate copy of the same file.
Saved puzzles are dealt one by one without repeats until you’ve been through the round, and any one can be removed from Saved.
The categories
Nine tabs across the top
The nine tabs sit across the top of the app — All, Saved, and seven subjects. Tap a tab, then tap New, and a quote from that tab is dealt. The counts below are the quotes in each subject tab from the current library — All covers all 71, and Saved is your own library, separate from the library.
Reading a puzzle
Key to the board
A CipherDesk puzzle is three small things stacked on every letter. Once you can read one cell, you can read the whole board — in the screenshots on this page and in the app alike.
- Your guess
- The large letter on top — the real letter you think the cipher letter stands for. It appears everywhere that cipher letter appears in the puzzle.
- Cipher letter
- The small letter under your guess — the letter as printed in the encoded quote. The same cipher letter always stands for the same real letter, throughout the puzzle.
- Frequency
- The tiny number under the cipher letter — how many times that letter appears in this puzzle. The busiest letters are the place to start.
- Never itself
- The cipher key is built so no letter ever encodes as itself — if a cipher letter is T, its answer is never T. One whole guess is ruled out before you start.
- Spaces & punctuation
- Only the letters A–Z are encoded. Word breaks and punctuation stay exactly where they are, so one-letter words and apostrophes are clues, not decoration.
- The author line
- Under the puzzle sits the quote’s attribution. Solve the puzzle and it’s revealed in full, alongside the “Solved! Well done.” banner.
The one rule that does most of the work: each letter stands for another letter — never itself — and it stands for that same letter every time it appears. Fill one in, and it fills in across the whole quote.
Take a puzzle to your desk
CipherDesk’s home on this site is the app itself — a fresh cipher, a hidden quote, and the whole desk of tools on one page. Open it and tap New.