Medium cryptograms
3878 of the 9159 puzzles in the catalog are graded medium, 42.3% 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.
The ordinary case, and the largest tier
42.3% of the catalog lands here. At an average of 71.5 letters these sit between the easy tier's 84 and the hard tier's 60.9, and the number that matters follows the same order: each distinct letter appears 3.7 times, against 4.4 and 3.1. There is enough repetition for a frequency count to mean something and not enough for it to be conclusive.
No single crack opens the grid
This is what distinguishes the middle. An easy cryptogram usually has one obvious way in, whether a repeated “the”, an apostrophe or a run of two-letter words, and solving it unravels most of the rest. Here the ways in are partial. 55.2% of these contain “the”, against 61.3% of the easy tier. They average 2.9 two-letter words where the easy tier has 4.1, and 0.9 single-letter words where it has 1.4.
Meanwhile 3.9 letters' worth of the alphabet appears exactly once per puzzle, weighted by how much that letter mattered. A letter used once cannot be found by counting at all; it comes out at the end, from the shape of the word it sits in, or by elimination when everything else is placed.
And the typical opening move is a coin flip: E is the most common letter in only 53.5% of these. Assume it and you will be wrong about half the time, which is worse than not assuming it, because a wrong E propagates into every word you try to read.
How to get through one
Work on shapes rather than counts. A word with a doubled letter, a word with the same letter first and last, a long word with no repeats: each of these is rare enough to be worth guessing at directly, and this tier's longest word averages 9 letters, which is plenty of shape to work with. Place a letter, read the neighboring words aloud in your head, and back out the moment a word becomes unpronounceable. Half of solving the middle tier is abandoning a guess quickly.
How much a shape is worth, meaning how far the pattern of repeats in a nine-letter word narrows the field and why that beats counting, is measured in how to solve a cryptogram.
This tier by the numbers
Averages over all 3878 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 | 3878 |
|---|---|
| Difficulty score | 44–59, averaging 51.6 |
| Letters | 71.5 |
| Distinct letters (unknowns) | 19.1 |
| Occurrences per unknown | 3.7 |
| Letters used exactly once, weighted | 3.9 |
| One-letter words | 0.9 |
| Two-letter words | 2.9 |
| Longest word | 9 |
| Contain the word “the” | 55.2% |
| Contain an apostrophe | 15.8% |
| E is the commonest letter | 53.5% |
Who you will be reading
The medium tier draws most heavily on Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. 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.
187 of this tier's 3878 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 medium tier actually spans 44 to 59, averaging 51.6.
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.