Polybius Square & Cryptogram

Polybius Square
Originally conceived by the Greek historian Polybius in the second century B.C., the Polybius
square or Polybius checkerboard is one of the simplest tools in cryptography. You can use a
Polybius square to encode a message that can then be deciphered only by someone who knows
the arrangement of letters in the square. It's not secure enough to send military secrets, but it
can be a fun way to learn about cryptography and to send secret messages to your friends.
Steps
Create an equal number of numbered rows and columns (see image). To determine how many
rows and columns to make, find the square number (also called a perfect square) that is nearest
to the number of letters in your alphabet. Then take the square root of that square number--this
will be the number of rows and columns in your Polybius square. For example, in the English
alphabet, there are 26 Write Different letters. The closest square number to 26 is 25, and the
square root of 25 is 5, so you would need 5 columns and 5 rows, as shown in the image. Other
languages use alphabets with more or fewer letters, so depending on the language used, the
Polybius square may have more or fewer than 5 rows and columns.
Write the letters of the alphabet in your grid. There should be one letter at the intersection of
each row and column. In the simplest form, you can just write the alphabet out in order, but if
you want to make the code harder to crack, you can mix up the letters. If there are too many
letters in the alphabet to fit into the square, you can omit one or two (preferably these are
uncommonly used letters). In the example, the letter "J" has been omitted. If there are too few
letters to fill the grid, you can leave some spaces blank or use them for punctuation, emoticons,
or whatever you like.
Replace the first letter of your message with the numbers that correspond to its coordinates.
Look at your Polybius square, and find the row and column numbers of your first letter. In the
example "I love wikiHow," the letter "I" is the first letter. "I" is located at the intersection of row 2
and column 4, so you would begin your coded message with the number 24 (the row number is
usually written before the column number).
Repeat the previous step for all the letters in your message. "I love wikiHow" becomes "24 31 34
51 15 52 24 25 24 23 34 52." You could also get rid of the spaces
(243134511552242524233452) or leave spaces only between words (24 31345115
52242524233452).
Decode the message by replacing each pair of coordinates with its corresponding letter. If you're
sending the message to someone, you'll need to also send them the Polybius square. Send it to
them separately to heighten the security of your message.
HOW TO SOLVE CRYPTOGRAMS

Pencil in a possibility. Fill in all examples of that letter in the puzzle, then see if you have created a dead
end and need to go back. For example, say you have decided that the letter Z is an I, but then you
discover that one of the encrypted words reads XZZ. You know that there is no word in the English
language that ends with two I's, so you need to find a different substitute for the Z.
Consider letter frequency. Typically, the most common letters used in English are: E, T, A, O, I, and N.
These will be the letters you are most likely to find in most cryptograms.
Solve any single letter words first. In English the only single letter words are A and I.
Look for common, small words next. The most commonly used words in the English language in order of
frequency are: the, of, and, to, in, a, is, that, be, it, by, are, for, was, as, he, with, on, his, at, which, but,
from, has, this, will, one, have, not, were, or, all, their, an, I, there, been, many, more, so, when, had, may.
Look for contractions and possessives. There are only a small number of letters that might appear after an
apostrophe and some have a recognizable pattern. For example if you saw the encrypted word QD'NN, you
would know that the N is an L, because there is no other possibility in English.

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Polybius Square

HOW TO SOLVE CRYPTOGRAMS

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