DAILY CRYPTOGRAM
HOW TO CRACK IT ◢
- Every letter has been swapped for a different one, the same way all the way through.
- Start with the short words. A one-letter word is A or I; a three-letter word is very often THE.
- The letter that turns up most is usually E, then T, then A.
- An apostrophe near the end of a word is a strong tell: it is nearly always followed by S or T.
- Guessing a letter changes every copy of it at once, so a good guess opens up the whole line.
WHERE THE QUOTES COME FROM ◢
All 120 quotes in the rotation are from works published before 1929, so the text is public domain, and each one is credited to the book, play, essay or letter it actually appears in rather than to a floating name. Where the English is a translator’s - Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Sun Tzu - the translation is named too. The famous misattributions are deliberately left out: the lines the internet hangs on Einstein, Gandhi, Darwin and Emerson that none of them wrote are not in here, because a cryptogram hands you the attribution as the prize and a wrong one is simply a wrong answer.