There are all sorts of strategies to solving cryptograms, you remember. Here are some common, helpful ones:
1. Look at letter frequencies. The letter L appears 26 times throughout the puzzle – twice as many as any other letter – so you can be pretty sure that it doesn't stand for J, Q, or X. C, G, J, and T each appear one time only, so it’s unlikely that any of them decodes into E.
2. Look for letter patterns. The third word in the puzzle is encoded as “HSS.” There aren't too many words in the English language that fit that pattern. But chances are it's nothing obscure like “ebb” or “coo” or “ell.” In English, the most common instances of that particular letter pattern are “all,” “see,” or "too."
3. Now scan the other words in the puzzle. E is the most common letter in the English language, so if “HSS” decodes into “see,” you should see lots of S’s in the rest of the puzzle. But there are only a handful of them, which is a sign that “HSS” probably doesn’t decode into “see.”
4. Identify the vowels. You know that nearly every word in the puzzle will have an A, E, I, O, and/or U in it. Look for the letters that appear most frequently and see if you can come up with a list of five where at least one of those letters shows up in every word in the puzzle. If the pattern “HSS” doesn't stand for "see," maybe it stands for "all" instead. So check: are there enough H's that it might stand for "A," appearing in a lot of different words?
5. Stick to it. Cryptograms get easier to solve the further along you go. Eventually, you’ll reach a tipping point: you’ll have figured out enough letters that the patterns of full words start to emerge. By the end of it, your pencil will be having trouble keeping up with your brain.
Find the solution to the puzzle on the Solution Page to determine where you go next. Or you can