Medium Cryptograms
The everyday newspaper level: enough letters to work with, no tricks.
This is the largest run of sheets on the site and the one that behaves most like the puzzle in a daily paper. Thirty-six quotations, spread over six sheets, drawn from Franklin's almanacks, Lincoln's letters and speeches, Emerson's essays, Seneca, Twain, and a long tail of proverbs that were already old when they were first written down. The quotations run from forty-one letters up to a hundred and twenty-two, so the later sheets take real time — a long quotation is not harder in principle, but it holds more places to go wrong.
Nothing here is engineered to trip you. The letter frequencies sit close to ordinary English, apostrophes fall where you expect them, and the word lengths are the ordinary ones. What makes the middle band middle is volume: enough text that frequency counting starts to be worth doing properly, and enough words that guessing one wrong early costs you a few minutes to unpick.
The everyday sheet. One a day with coffee, a stack of them for a car journey, or a photocopied set for a puzzle group where people work at different speeds and you want nobody stranded.
This section: 36 quotations, written between 49 and 1926, 41 to 122 letters long, graded medium. Voices you will meet: Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Helen Keller, Henry David Thoreau and 12 more.
The 6 sheets
Set 1
6 puzzles · Medium
Set 2
6 puzzles · Medium
Set 3
6 puzzles · Medium
Set 4
6 puzzles · Medium
Set 5
6 puzzles · Medium
Set 6
6 puzzles · Medium
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.