Drop Quotes

The puzzle that shows you every letter and hides the sentence

Most word puzzles keep something back. A crossword withholds the answers; a cryptogram withholds the alphabet. A drop quote is oddly generous — every letter of the answer is on the page from the start, in the right column, and you could read the whole quotation off the piles if only you knew which row each letter belonged to. That one missing fact is the entire game. What is left to reason with is the shape of English: where the words break, how long they are, and what a column of five letters can possibly spell when only one of them fits the row.

• 478 quotations in the pool, from 125 sources — the same hand-checked collection the cryptograms use
• 1 in 8 columns is settled before you read a word: one letter, or every letter the same
• 10²⁵ ways the piles of an average hard grid could fall — and exactly one of them is the quote

How it plays

The grid is 13 squares wide. Tap a square and it lights up along with the pile over its column; tap a letter in that pile and it drops in. Or just type — a letter lands in the square your cursor is on, if the column still has one to give, and the cursor moves on to the next empty square. Backspace lifts a letter back out into its pile. Dropped letters fade in the pile, so you can always see what a column has left, and the arrow keys walk the grid — up and down follow the column, the direction the letters fell.

Difficulty is not the length of the quote, though it comes to almost the same thing. Each pile of letters can be dealt into its column in some number of ways — a pile of A, E and T has six orderings, a pile of T, T and T has one — and multiplying those together gives the number of grids the piles allow. The three tiers are the pool's terciles of that number.

Check strikes through anything in the wrong row and costs nothing. Hint drops one letter into the square you are on — if that letter was sitting in the wrong row, it moves — and it is free, but a hint-free solve is what sets a best time. Reveal is there when a grid beats you, and it voids that solve; the counters on this page only ever count honest ones. A challenge link sends a friend the identical grid, because the layout is worked out from the quotation itself and never from chance.

You are never guessing a letter. You are deciding which of a handful of letters you can see belongs on this row — and the row is a sentence.

Where the drop quote comes from

Nobody seems to have recorded who first shook the letters out of a quotation, which is a pity, because it is a genuinely clever idea. The form grew up in the American puzzle magazines, where it is printed as a Quotefall; in some books the letters lie beneath the grid instead of above it and the puzzle is a Fallen Phrase; online it is mostly a drop quote, a name that describes what you do rather than what happened. Whatever it is called, the construction is the same: write the words into a grid without breaking any across a line, black out the spaces, then let each column's letters fall and sort them so that the piles hold no information about order.

It belongs to a small family of puzzles built on quotations, and its nearest relative lives on this site. A cryptogram takes the same sentence and swaps every letter for a different one, leaving the positions alone. A drop quote does the exact opposite — the letters are untouched, and it is the positions that are scrambled. The two puzzles are mirror images, and they are solved with mirror-image instincts.

• Drop quote

  Shows you the letters, hides where they go.

  Solved by word shape: a row of one square is A or I, the letters before a black square must end a word, and every column is a tiny anagram.

  The long quotes are the hard ones — more rows, taller piles.

• Cryptogram

  Shows you where the letters go, hides what they are.

  Solved by frequency: count the symbols, find THE, follow the apostrophes.

  The short quotes are the hard ones — fewer repeats, less evidence. Same 480 quotations, graded the other way round.

Why the long ones are the hard ones here

A 13-wide grid holds a quotation of 38 letters in four rows or so, and a quotation of 64 letters in seven. Every extra row is another letter in every pile, and the number of ways a pile can fall grows with its height the way factorials grow — not gently. So when the pool is graded by counting those ways and cut into thirds, length falls out of it almost exactly. That would be unremarkable except that the cryptogram grades the very same quotations and comes to the opposite answer, which is worth seeing side by side.

• Drop quotes
• Easy 38 letters
• Medium 49 letters
• Hard 64 letters
• Cryptograms
• Easy 60 letters
• Medium 50 letters
• Hard 40 letters

Here the hard band averages 64 letters against easy's 38; next door it is 40 against 60. A substitution cipher is broken by repetition, so more text is more evidence. A drop quote is broken by word shape, so more text is just more piles.

What the columns tell you before you read a word

Roughly in the order you should look — and every figure below is counted from the 478 grids this page actually deals.

• EE Drop the free columns first A pile with one letter, or with every letter the same, has nowhere else to go. 13% of all columns are like that — about 1.7 per grid — and filling them in costs nothing and turns the rows from blank into partly spelled.
• 4▪ Count the pile against the rows A pile as tall as the grid means no black square in that column — 29% of columns are full height. A pile one short has exactly one gap, and towards the right-hand edge that gap is far more often the end of a row than a space between words.
• AI A one-square word is A or I Ordinary English has exactly two one-letter words, and 38% of these grids have at least one. The pile above that square usually settles which: A appears 216 times across the pool, I 66.
• IS Two squares: a very short list English keeps a small stock of two-letter words, and the ones that turn up most here are IS, TO, OF, IN, IT, BE. Two piles, a handful of candidates, and usually only one that both piles can supply.
• _E▪ Read the square before each black one It ends a word, and English ends words with a short list of letters: E, S, T, N, D close 60% of the words in this pool. If the pile offers one of those and a Q, you know which fell here.
• THE Then hunt for THE 5.3% of every word in these quotations — 312 appearances. Any three-square word whose piles offer a T, an H and an E in that order is a strong candidate, and placing it spends three letters from three different piles at once.

The sentence is the only clue — measured

Here is a thing the build discovered while checking these grids, and it changes how you should play. Two words of the same length that sit in the same columns on different rows can trade places without the piles noticing: ELIMINATED and IMPOSSIBLE in one grid here are dealt from exactly the same letters, and every column is satisfied whichever row each takes. 86% of the quotations in the pool have at least one such pair. Go further and allow any everyday word in any slot, and 55% of them have a second fill that is real words all the way across — just not the quotation.

We prove this rather than assume it because the site's anagram crossword refuses to deal any grid with a second solution, and the same rule looked as though it should apply here. It doesn't, and the numbers say why: applied strictly it would leave a few dozen quotes, and every alternative it found reads as nonsense the moment you say it aloud. The columns are not meant to settle a drop quote. Reading is.

How these puzzles are put together

The grid is worked out fresh in your browser from the quotation's text, by the same steps the build uses to grade it — so a phone, a laptop and a friend's challenge link all deal the identical puzzle.

1. Wrap the words. 13 squares across, as many whole words per row as fit, one black square between neighbours. Nothing is ever hyphenated, so a word longer than the grid can't be dealt — 2 of the collection sit out for that reason. An apostrophe rides on the letter before it rather than taking a square of its own; every other mark is dropped.
2. Drop and sort. Each column's letters are collected and put in alphabetical order, so the pile holds no trace of which row a letter came from. Every row is ragged on the right — the top row is 70% full on average, the bottom row 58% — so the right-hand columns have the shortest piles and the least to say.
3. Count the ways. For every pile, the number of distinct orders it could fall in; multiplied up, the number of grids the piles allow. Bands are the pool's terciles of that figure, which is why nobody chose which quotes are "hard".
4. Look for other fills. Every grid is searched for a second way of dropping the piles that spells everyday words in every slot — not to reject it, but to measure it, and to make sure the honest answer to "could the columns alone settle this?" is printed above rather than assumed.

On paper

This was a pencil puzzle long before it was a screen one, and it prints beautifully: the sorted piles above, the grid below, black squares inked in. The pack button above builds a PDF of fresh puzzles at the difficulty you choose — two to a row at normal size, one per row in large print — with a name-and-date line for classrooms and an answer key on its own pages. For a teacher it is a quiet lesson in word boundaries and spelling patterns, dressed up as a bit of gravity.

If you're enjoying this

The obvious next stop is the cryptograms, which hide the same quotations the other way round. If it was the little column-anagrams you liked, anagrams and the word scramble are all rearranging, and the anagram crossword puts it in a grid. If it was the word-shape reading, the fill-in crossword is that instinct with a word bank. All free, no account, no daily ration.