🔍 Ciphers & Codes Trivia Questions & Answers
The Zodiac, the Voynich manuscript and codes still unbroken. Below are 30 free ciphers & codes trivia questions with answers — part of Mysteries trivia on BUZZ. Want a real challenge that adapts to what you know? Play the Mysteries quiz — no signup needed to start.
30 Ciphers & Codes trivia questions
Q1. What common nickname, tied to 18th-century lodges, is given to the grid-based letter cipher?
Answer: The Freemason's cipher
💡 Lodges used it to keep records and correspondence private long before it became a puzzle-book staple.
Q2. What historic first message did Samuel Morse send by telegraph in 1844?
Answer: What hath God wrought
💡 It traveled instantly from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore over his new electromagnetic line.
Q3. What term describes hiding a secret message so its very existence stays concealed?
Answer: Steganography
💡 Unlike a cipher, which scrambles a message, steganography hides that a message exists at all.
Q4. This illustrated codex, written in an uncracked script nicknamed 'Voynichese,' lives where today?
Answer: Yale University
💡 The manuscript's vellum was carbon-dated to 1404–1438, though whether the text itself is genuinely that old is still debated.
Q5. Jim Sanborn's encrypted sculpture at a US intelligence HQ goes by what one-word name?
Answer: Kryptos
💡 It was dedicated on November 3, 1990, right at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Q6. This stamped-clay disc from Crete has 241 symbols in an unknown script — what's it called?
Answer: The Phaistos Disc
💡 It was found in 1908 and some researchers think its stamped symbols could be one of the earliest known uses of movable type.
Q7. Which trilingual slab, found in Egypt in 1799, finally cracked the code of hieroglyphs?
Answer: The Rosetta Stone
💡 It took about twenty years after its discovery before Jean-François Champollion announced he'd cracked the script in 1822.
Q8. What civilization used Linear B to record its Bronze Age Greek language?
Answer: The Mycenaeans
💡 Around 70% of Linear B's symbols were borrowed from the older, still-unread Linear A script of the Minoans.
Q9. Julius Caesar reportedly protected dispatches by shifting every letter forward by how many spots?
Answer: Three
💡 That simple shift-by-three trick is still taught today as one of the very first lessons in cryptography.
Q10. A book cipher's real advantage for a spy is that, if searched, the key looks like what?
Answer: An innocent book
💡 A discovered codebook instantly proves espionage; a book on a shelf raises no suspicion.
Q11. Morse code assigns short, simple signals to common letters like 'E' based on what?
Answer: How often they're used
💡 Alfred Vail estimated English letter frequency by counting a printer's spare type blocks.
Q12. Herodotus describes an ancient trick of hiding a warning message underneath a layer of what?
Answer: A layer of wax
💡 The messenger's wooden tablet looked blank until the wax coating was scraped away.
Q13. What year did dealer Wilfrid Voynich rediscover the manuscript now bearing his name?
Answer: 1912
💡 The book had actually been hiding in plain sight for centuries before Voynich spotted it and realized nobody could read a word of it.
Q14. In WWII, Turing's team cracked Germany's Enigma machine at which English country estate?
Answer: Bletchley Park
💡 By 1944 nearly 10,000 people worked there, about three-quarters of them women.
Q15. The legendary Beale Ciphers supposedly point to a fortune buried in the 1820s in which US state?
Answer: Virginia
💡 The tale says a man named Thomas Beale hid gold and silver near Bedford County after a lucky mining strike out west.
Q16. Which famous document was used as the key to crack the one solved Beale cipher?
Answer: The Declaration of Independence
💡 Solvers matched each number in the cipher to a word in the document and took its first letter — but the other two ciphers still won't budge.
Q17. Whose royal name in a repeated oval cartouche gave Champollion his crucial hieroglyph foothold?
Answer: Ptolemy
💡 British scholar Thomas Young had already linked that cartouche to phonetic sounds years before Champollion pushed the breakthrough further.
Q18. Composer Edward Elgar mailed a friend an uncracked note in loopy symbols — what's it nicknamed?
Answer: The Dorabella Cipher
💡 It was sent in 1897 to a young woman named Dora Penny, whose nickname 'Dorabella' later named one of Elgar's famous musical variations.
Q19. Which imprisoned queen was convicted of treason in 1586 once her coded letters were cracked?
Answer: Mary, Queen of Scots
💡 Codebreaker Thomas Phelippes used frequency analysis to crack her 64-symbol nomenclator cipher and exposed the Babington Plot.
Q20. For 300 years, French cryptographers dubbed which cipher 'le chiffre indechiffrable'?
Answer: The Vigenere cipher
💡 It was actually devised by Giovan Battista Bellaso in 1553, not by Vigenere himself.
Q21. Which cipher, keyed to a truly random pad used only once, is genuinely unbreakable?
Answer: The one-time pad
💡 Mathematician Claude Shannon later proved its 'perfect secrecy' in a 1949 paper.
Q22. The Playfair cipher, the first to encrypt letter pairs, was actually invented by whom?
Answer: Charles Wheatstone
💡 It is named after Lord Playfair, who promoted it, though Wheatstone devised it in 1854.
Q23. The Enigma cipher machine began as a commercial device patented in 1918 by whom?
Answer: Arthur Scherbius
💡 Banks and businesses could buy it, but it sold poorly before the German military adopted it.
Q24. Enigma's settings were scrambled further by an add-on that swapped letter pairs, the what?
Answer: The plugboard
💡 Swapping just a handful of letter pairs multiplied the machine's possible settings enormously.
Q25. Which unwritten language became the basis of WWII's unbroken Pacific radio code?
Answer: Navajo
💡 Japanese cryptographers, skilled at cracking other US codes, never broke a single Navajo message.
Q26. The Rossignols' 'Great Cipher' stumped French codebreakers for about how long?
Answer: Over 200 years
💡 Officer Etienne Bazeries finally broke it in 1893 after three years of dedicated work.
Q27. Which 9th-century Baghdad scholar pioneered frequency analysis, the first codebreaking method?
Answer: Al-Kindi
💡 He realized letter-frequency patterns alone could crack almost any substitution cipher.
Q28. Which unsolved 18th-century carved code sits below a mirrored Poussin painting in England?
Answer: Shugborough Inscription
💡 Staff say they get several visitors a week claiming to have solved it, and stay skeptical of them all.
Q29. Benedict Arnold's book cipher used Nathan Bailey's what as its secret key text?
Answer: Dictionary
💡 Locations were given as page, line, and word count rather than plain letters.
Q30. What specific name is given to a book cipher citing page, line, and word position, as Arnold used?
Answer: Ottendorf cipher
💡 It's a fancier variant of the plain book cipher, pinpointing an exact word's location.
Think you know ciphers & codes?
BUZZ tracks what you’ve mastered and serves exactly what you need next. Play free — no signup to start.
PLAY FREE →