Hard Cryptograms
Longer quotes, rarer letter patterns, fewer easy footholds.
Twenty-five quotations chosen because they resist the usual first move. Several are proverbs — the omelette and the eggs, the dogs and the fleas, fool me once — which are short, idiomatic, and full of words that do not appear in the frequency tables at their usual rates. Others come from Twain and Wilde, who wrote sentences that turn on a single unexpected word, and from Aesop by way of the old translations, where the phrasing is deliberately plain and gives you very little to grip.
Expect fewer footholds. Some of these have no single-letter word at all, several put their only THE in the last third, and a couple lean on letters that are rare in general English but common inside this particular sentence, which quietly breaks a frequency count taken on the first pass. Work the short words and the doubled pairs first, and be willing to abandon a guess: on this band the second guess is usually the right one.
For somebody who has run out of patience with the easy end. One of these is an evening, not a coffee break. The answer page names the year and the source for every line, which matters more here because a few of the phrasings are older than the modern versions people quote.
This section: 969 quotations, written between 700 BC and 1945, 40 to 139 letters long, graded hard. Voices you will meet: Abraham Cowley, Abraham Lincoln, Aeschylus, Aesop, Alexander Pope, Alfred Tennyson and 118 more.
The 162 sheets
Set 1
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 2
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 3
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 4
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 5
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 6
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 7
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 8
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 9
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 10
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 11
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 12
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 13
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 14
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 15
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 16
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 17
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 18
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 19
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 20
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 21
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 22
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 23
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 24
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 25
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 26
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 27
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 28
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 29
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 30
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 31
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 32
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 33
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 34
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 35
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 36
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 37
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 38
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 39
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 40
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 41
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 42
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 43
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 44
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 45
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 46
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 47
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 48
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 49
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 50
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 51
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 52
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 53
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 54
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 55
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 56
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 57
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 58
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 59
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 60
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 61
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 62
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 63
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 64
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 65
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 66
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 67
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 68
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 69
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 70
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 71
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 72
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 73
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 74
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 75
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 76
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 77
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 78
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 79
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 80
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 81
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 82
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 83
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 84
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 85
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 86
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 87
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 88
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 89
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 90
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 91
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 92
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 93
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 94
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 95
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 96
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 97
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 98
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 99
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 100
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 101
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 102
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 103
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 104
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 105
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 106
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 107
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 108
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 109
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 110
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 111
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 112
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 113
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 114
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 115
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 116
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 117
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 118
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 119
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 120
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 121
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 122
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 123
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 124
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 125
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 126
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 127
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 128
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 129
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 130
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 131
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 132
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 133
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 134
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 135
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 136
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 137
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 138
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 139
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 140
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 141
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 142
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 143
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 144
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 145
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 146
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 147
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 148
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 149
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 150
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 151
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 152
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 153
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 154
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 155
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 156
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 157
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 158
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 159
6 puzzles · Hard
Set 160
5 puzzles · Hard
Set 161
5 puzzles · Hard
Set 162
5 puzzles · Hard
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.