Cryptogram Puzzle 989
Answers

Cryptogram Puzzle 989 decodes to a quotation of 27 words attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero. It runs to 172 characters and uses 23 distinct letters.

The chart above shows the real letter frequencies of this quote — I×23, T×17, S×14, E×13, A×9. That is the pattern that cracks it: in ordinary English E is the commonest letter by a wide margin, so whichever cipher symbol appears most in the puzzle is the first substitution worth testing. We publish the decoded quote and its author; the game generates its own substitution alphabet per player, so no fixed cipher is shown here.

This quote contains 10 short words of three letters or fewer, which are the other obvious way in — one-letter words are always A or I, and the commonest three-letter word by a wide margin is THE. Fixing one of those typically reveals enough of the text to read the rest.

This puzzle sits in the 901–1,000 block, with puzzle 988 and puzzle 990 linked at the foot of the page, so you can keep moving without returning to the index.