Easy cryptograms
474 of the 1496 quotations in the catalogue are graded easy — 31.7% of everything here. The grade is measured rather than assigned: every quotation 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 81.5 letters. A hard one averages 60.1 — a quarter shorter. That is the opposite of the way puzzle length usually works, and 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 quotation is, so a longer quotation 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 quotation uses 18.5 distinct letters and a hard one uses 19.3: 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. 54.4% of these quotations contain the word the, which is the biggest gift in English: a three-letter word appearing more than once is nearly always that one, and it settles T, H and E together.
An easy quotation carries 1.2 single-letter words on average — every one of them is a or I, a choice between two — and 4.4 two-letter words, which draw from a list of about twenty and pin down the commonest letters between them. The hard tier averages 2.3.
36.3% of them 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 favour here. E is the commonest letter in English, so the standard opening is to assume the commonest symbol is E — and that works in 53.8% of this tier, more often than in either of the others.
If you are solving your first one
Count the symbols and look at the top of the list. Find the three-letter word that repeats and try the. Look for a single-letter word and try a. 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.
This tier by the numbers
Averages over all 474 of them, measured from the plaintext. The same measurements are taken for every quotation in the catalogue, so the three tiers can be compared line for line.
| Puzzles in this tier | 474 |
|---|---|
| Difficulty score | 6–43, averaging 35.1 |
| Letters | 81.5 |
| Distinct letters (unknowns) | 18.5 |
| Occurrences per unknown | 4.4 |
| Letters used exactly once, weighted | 2.6 |
| One-letter words | 1.2 |
| Two-letter words | 4.4 |
| Longest word | 8.7 |
| Contain the word “the” | 54.4% |
| Contain an apostrophe | 36.3% |
| E is the commonest letter | 53.8% |
Who you will be reading
The easy tier draws most heavily on Jane Austen, Cassandra Clare, C. S. Lewis, John Green, Oscar Wilde and J. K. Rowling. 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.
How the grade is worked out
Each quotation gets a score from 0 to 100, built from about a dozen counts: 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 6 to 43, averaging 35.1.
Length is not one of the inputs, and that is the part most people find surprising — see below. Nor is vocabulary: a long word is easier, not harder, because its shape is rarer and therefore more identifiable.