Expert Cryptograms
Awkward letter frequencies and long words. Bring the frequency chart.
Twelve of them, and they are the awkward ones. Jefferson on honesty, Dickinson, George Eliot, Thoreau, a run of proverbs that reach back to the fifth century before Christ, and one Wilde line that reads as if it were built to be misparsed. What puts a quotation in this band is not length — several are under fifty letters — but letter distribution: the counts inside these sentences pull noticeably away from the counts in ordinary English text.
This is where a frequency table stops being an oracle and turns into a hint. Two of these sentences have their most common letter land on something other than E. Several avoid single-letter words entirely. The reliable attack is structural rather than statistical: find the repeated word shapes, find the apostrophe and use it — the letter after an apostrophe is nearly always T, S, RE, VE, LL or D — and work outward from a word whose pattern only fits a handful of candidates.
For the solver who finishes the newspaper puzzle before the coffee cools. Bring a pencil with an eraser. If you want the frequency table beside you rather than in your head, the cheat sheet prints on a single page.
This section: 484 quotations, written between 700 BC and 1944, 40 to 107 letters long, graded expert. Voices you will meet: Abraham Lincoln, Aesop, Alain-Rene Lesage, Alexander Pope, Alfred Tennyson, Andrew Jackson and 82 more.
The 81 sheets
Set 1
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 2
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 3
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 4
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 5
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 6
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 7
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 8
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 9
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 10
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 11
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 12
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 13
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 14
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 15
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 16
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 17
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 18
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 19
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 20
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 21
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 22
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 23
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 24
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 25
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 26
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 27
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 28
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 29
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 30
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 31
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 32
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 33
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 34
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 35
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 36
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 37
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 38
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 39
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 40
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 41
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 42
6 puzzles · Expert
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6 puzzles · Expert
Set 44
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 45
6 puzzles · Expert
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6 puzzles · Expert
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6 puzzles · Expert
Set 48
6 puzzles · Expert
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6 puzzles · Expert
Set 50
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 51
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 52
6 puzzles · Expert
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6 puzzles · Expert
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6 puzzles · Expert
Set 55
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 56
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 57
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 58
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 59
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 60
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 61
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 62
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 63
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 64
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 65
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 66
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 67
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 68
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 69
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 70
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 71
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 72
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 73
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 74
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 75
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 76
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 77
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 78
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 79
6 puzzles · Expert
Set 80
5 puzzles · Expert
Set 81
5 puzzles · Expert
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.