In this paper, we consider a symbolic dynamic method, based on going athwart the coupled map lattices, to estimate unknown initial conditions of nonlinear dynamical system from the given symbolic vector sequence. It is proved that any value taken from the interval IN will converge to the initial conditions with the iteration of athwart-coupled map lattices function, and an initial condition detection method from symbolic vector sequence is presented. Both theoretical and experimental results show that the estimation method can establish one-to-one correspondence between the initial conditions of coupled map lattices and their symbolic vector sequence; therefore this technique appears to be ideally suited for information estimation.