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: 25 quotations, written between 560 BC and 1903, 40 to 80 letters long, graded hard. Voices you will meet: Aesop, Benjamin Franklin, Confucius, Emily Bronte, George Washington, Henry David Thoreau and 7 more.
The 5 sheets
Set 1
5 puzzles · Hard
Set 2
5 puzzles · Hard
Set 3
5 puzzles · Hard
Set 4
5 puzzles · Hard
Set 5
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.