Cyclic-selective mapping (SLM) for wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems combines an original signal and its cyclic shifted signal to reduce a peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) in time domain. However, side information (SI) regarding to the amount of the cyclic shift is required at the receiver, and how to transmit it is one of the most challenging issues of SLM schemes because it decreases the throughput of wireless OFDM systems. The delayed correlation based estimation scheme is proposed in this paper to avoid the transmission of the SI. This scheme exploits the correlation between a guard interval sequence and a received signal with delay to estimate the amount of the cyclic shift at the receiver side. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the proposed scheme can estimate the delay with an accuracy of more than 0.99 at an $$E_b/N_0$$ E b / N 0 of 8 dB and achieve the PAPR that is equivalent to the conventional SLM while the bit error rate degradation is slightly different from that with perfect shift estimation.