Zodiac’s favorite words
The killer’s first cipher was solved rather quickly by amateur codebreakers because they guessed that the killer would use words such as “I” and “kill”. Can similar guesswork help us solve the unsolved 340-character cipher? This is something people have been trying for years. But nobody has yet unlocked the mystery.
Zodiac sent many letters over the years, taunting the public about his crimes. From this collection of plain text, we can see what words he really likes to use in his writings.
Here are the results of an experiment that uses an algorithm to detect phrases and words that repeat in his writings. Perhaps somewhere among the results is something that might appear in the real solution of the 340-character cipher, if it indeed contains one.
So you’re including the Bates confession letter? I thought that was ruled out as a Zodiac letter by its poetic tone and language.
I don’t really know what to make of the material surrounding the murder of Bates. I tend to focus more on analyzing the ciphers than the other material. But here is an interesting thread on the topic.
I think you are right that the material isn’t as strongly linked to the Zodiac killer as his other letters and correspondences.
Many thanks for the collection of Z’s favorite words.
It will be useful for cipher analysis, but I can imagine it being very helpful for other analysis as well.
Although, I am relatively unschooled in ciphers, I appreciate the value that a list of key words like this would have for cryptanalysis. But what of the mundane structure words and common words that make up almost all sentences–words like ‘the’, ‘it’, ‘because’, ‘while’, ‘since’, etc? How helpful are they to the decryption effort?
-G