The Enigma Device

Swap letters to unscramble a famous/humorous quote - Two new puzzles every day.

This entertaining puzzle has become a classic. The original versions were inspired by "The Enigma Machine" which the Germans used to encode and decode messages in World War II.

In this simplified version, a one-stage letter substitution is used to scramble a well-known or humorous quotation. Your task is to unravel the quotation by swapping letter pairs until the original message is restored.

You swap letter pairs by selecting a letter and then a second letter by pressing it -- or with a keyboard if available.

The histogram shows letter frequencies. Since E and T are the most common letters, a good way to start is to make the most frequent letters in the histogram E and T. Then look for words like THE, AND and A and keep swapping letter pairs until words you recognize start to emerge.

There are two new puzzles every day. If you can't solve one today, come back tomorrow and see the solution.

This puzzle was programmed in Java as a freshman class programming exercise at Harvard in 1996 and has been played over two million times.