Word: cryptogramic
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Such are some of the nuggets from the cryptologic trove amassed by David Kahn, past president of the American Cryptogram Association. His huge volume shows how the science of cryptology has influenced the course of nations and the fate of rulers and rogues, soldiers and statesmen, poets and pirates. The speed with which the Navy switched codes following the Pueblo crisis is only the latest public indication of cryptology's continuing importance...
Consider this simple cryptogram...
...letter cryptogram, an appropriate frequency table for English looks like this...
...avoid one another. A contact chart would show that three of the most common letters in the ciphertext -O, U and A-are the most mutually exclusive. OA appears twice, OU once, and UO, UA, AO and AU not at all. But NU appears five times in the cryptogram. It happens that the most frequent English vowel diagraph is ea. Thus it is a good bet that U = a. Similarly, since the combination io is most frequent among the three dissident vowels in English, assume that it is represented in the cipher by OA. Therefore...
...cryptanalyst, ciphertext Y is also significant. In the cryptogram, it runs before N and never follows it; at the same time, it always follows H and never precedes it. This is the usual behavior of plaintext h: the diagraph he is commonplace, but eh is unusual; th is the most frequent diagraph of all, but ht less so. Therefore, in the cryptogram, Y=h and H should equal...