Easy Cryptograms
Short quotes, common words and plenty of one- and two-letter words to start from.
These are the sheets we hand somebody who has never worked a substitution puzzle in their life. Every quotation here is one plain sentence in modern spelling — a line of Shakespeare, a line of Dickens, a line of Austen, a line of Franklin — with no proper names to guess at, no dialect, and nothing that needs a footnote. The shortest runs forty-one letters and the longest ninety-two, which means the whole puzzle sits in front of you at once instead of running on past the point where you can hold it in your head.
Every puzzle in this batch gives you at least one single-letter word, and in English a single letter can only be A or I. Most of them also hand you a three-letter word early, and the odds are heavily that it is THE. Those two facts are usually enough to crack the first line, and once four or five letters are settled the rest tends to fall in a rush. Doubled letters are the other way in: a repeated pair almost always means LL, EE, SS, OO or TT.
A first session, a grandchild working alongside a grandparent, or any group where the point is that everybody finishes. Reckon on ten to twenty minutes a puzzle at the start, and rather less by the third one.
This section: 8 quotations, written between 1597 and 1891, 41 to 92 letters long, graded easy. Voices you will meet: Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare.
The 2 sheets
Every sheet prints on US Letter with half-inch margins, gives you a blank line under each cipher letter, and keeps the answer key on its own page so nothing is spoiled while you work.