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: 12 quotations, written between 400 BC and 1904, 41 to 72 letters long, graded expert. Voices you will meet: Benjamin Franklin, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and 3 more.
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.