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: 484 quotations, written between 194 BC and 1945, 40 to 140 letters long, graded easy. Voices you will meet: Abraham Lincoln, Aesop, Alain-Rene Lesage, Alexander Pope, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Disraeli and 83 more.
The 81 sheets
Set 1
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 2
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 3
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 4
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 5
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 6
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 7
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 8
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 9
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 10
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 11
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 12
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 13
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 14
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 15
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 16
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 17
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 18
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 19
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 20
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 21
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 22
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 23
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 24
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 25
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 26
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 27
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 28
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 29
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 30
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 31
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 32
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 33
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 34
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 35
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 36
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 37
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 38
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 39
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 40
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 41
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 42
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 43
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 44
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 45
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 46
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 47
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 48
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 49
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 50
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 51
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 52
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 53
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 54
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 55
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 56
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 57
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 58
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 59
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 60
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 61
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 62
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 63
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 64
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 65
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 66
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 67
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 68
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 69
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 70
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 71
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 72
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 73
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 74
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 75
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 76
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 77
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 78
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 79
6 puzzles · Easy
Set 80
5 puzzles · Easy
Set 81
5 puzzles · Easy
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.