cryptogrammist

Why this word is great

CRYPTOGRAMMIST — [Noun] A person who creates or solves cryptograms, those tantalizing puzzles where letters are substituted or rearranged to conceal meaning. From cryptogram (Greek kryptos, "hidden," + gramma, "letter") + -ist ("one who practices or is concerned with something"). Unlike "cryptographer" (who deals in the vast machinery of modern encryption) or "codebreaker" (who may dismantle military ciphers or ancient scripts), the cryptogrammist is a creature of deliberate, playful concealment—a solver of newspaper puzzles, a composer of love letters meant to be decoded over coffee, a patient unraveler of letters shuffled like a deck of cards. It is the faint graphite smudge of pencil on newsprint, the slow unfurling of a Caesar cipher like a locked drawer yielding its contents, the quiet satisfaction of restoring order to a scrambled alphabet—a small defiance against the chaos of the unreadable world.