Easy cryptograms
2700 of the 9159 puzzles in the catalog are graded easy, 29.5% of everything here. The grade is measured rather than assigned: every puzzle is scored on what its own letters give away, and this page is what that score turns out to mean.
Easy means long, not short
An easy cryptogram averages 84 letters, while a hard one is much shorter at 60.9. Seems counterintuitive, but it is the single most useful thing to understand about substitution ciphers.
A cryptogram is solved by evidence, and the text is the evidence. There are only 26 letters to identify however long the sentence is, so a longer sentence is the same problem with more to go on. In this tier each distinct letter appears 4.4 times on average, against 3.1 times in the hard tier. Frequency counting works when a letter appears nine times and not when it appears twice, and that ratio is the difference.
The same arithmetic explains the endgame. An easy puzzle uses 19 distinct letters and a hard one uses 19.5; fewer unknowns, spread over more text.
What gives these away
The opening move in any cryptogram is to find a letter you can be almost certain of, and this tier hands several over. 61.3% of these puzzles contain the word “the”, which is the biggest gift in English: it is by a distance the most common three-letter word, and it settles T, H and E together. It is a good guess rather than a safe one: how to solve a cryptogram has the measured odds, and they are lower than the advice usually implies.
An easy puzzle carries 1.4 single-letter words on average, and every one of them is A or I, a choice between two. The easy tier also contains an average of 4.1 two-letter words, which draw from a list of about twenty and pin down the most common letters between them. The hard tier averages 2.
26.7% of words contain an apostrophe followed by a letter. That is the only mark in a cryptogram that hands a letter over outright rather than narrowing a field: what follows an apostrophe is almost always S, T, D, L, M, R or V, and in “n’t” it settles two letters at once.
One more thing runs in your favor here. E is the most common letter in English, so the standard opening is to assume the most common symbol is E. That works in 56.9% of this tier, more often than in either of the others.
If you are solving your first one
Find an apostrophe first. What follows one is a letter you can very nearly name outright, and this is the tier most likely to give you the chance. Then take the single-letter words, A or I, and the two-letter words, which come from a short list. Count the symbols after that rather than before: the count ranks your suspects, and this tier repeats its letters often enough for the ranking to be worth something.
Then read what those choices imply about the words around them. A cryptogram is solved by the words, not by the letters, and every letter you place makes a word somewhere else nearly readable. The long version, with the measurements behind each step, is how to solve a cryptogram.
This tier by the numbers
Averages over all 2700 puzzles, measured from the plaintext. The same measurements are taken for every puzzle in the catalog, so the three tiers can be compared line for line.
| Puzzles in this tier | 2700 |
|---|---|
| Difficulty score | 0–43, averaging 35.4 |
| Letters | 84 |
| Distinct letters (unknowns) | 19 |
| Occurrences per unknown | 4.4 |
| Letters used exactly once, weighted | 2.5 |
| One-letter words | 1.4 |
| Two-letter words | 4.1 |
| Longest word | 8.8 |
| Contain the word “the” | 61.3% |
| Contain an apostrophe | 26.7% |
| E is the commonest letter | 56.9% |
Who you will be reading
The easy tier draws most heavily on Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Brontë. Difficulty has nothing to do with who said a thing. An author appears in all three tiers depending on how each sentence happens to fall.
32 of this tier's 2700 puzzles are not quotations at all. They are authored facts — written for this site, each one checked against a named source — so they are dealt alongside the books and attributed to nobody.
How the grade is worked out
Each puzzle gets a score from 0 to 100, built from about a dozen metrics: how many letters it uses, how many of them appear only once, how many short words it contains, whether it has an apostrophe, whether E leads the frequency table. Below 44 is easy, 60 and above is hard, and the middle is everything else. The easy tier actually spans 0 to 43, averaging 35.4.
Length is not one of the inputs, and that is the part most people find surprising. Nor is vocabulary; a long word is easier, not harder, because its shape is rarer and therefore more identifiable.
The full model, covering every input, which way each one runs, and what the catalog says each is worth to a solver, is set out in how to solve a cryptogram.