Cryptograms

Each puzzle is a proverb or a line from a public-domain book, with every letter swapped for a different one. Type a letter into a blank and every blank under the same cipher letter fills in. Check marks wrong letters in red, Hint fills in a letter, and Letter counts shows how often each cipher letter appears.

Easy gives you three letters to start, Medium one, and Hard none. There's no timer on the screen and no penalty for checking. Your place in each level is kept on this device.

Start with the short words. A one-letter word is almost always A or I, and the commonest three-letter word in English is THE. An apostrophe followed by one letter is usually S or T.

Look for patterns: a doubled letter, or a word whose letters repeat, like the two Es in THESE. Then use the letter counts: E, T, A, O and N turn up most in English. Fill each guess in everywhere at once, and the rest of the message starts to read itself.

No letter ever stands for itself, so a cipher A is never a plain A.