Drop Quote

A quotation’s letters have fallen out of their grid; each column’s letters hang above it in alphabetical order. Drop them back so the rows read the quote.

What it is

Also known as Fallen Phrases: a quote laid into a fixed-width grid, spaces blacked out, words never split across rows, and every column’s letters extracted and sorted. The deeper a column’s pool, the harder the choice.

How to play

Start with one-letter pools — they place themselves — and short words next to black cells. Every placement removes a letter from its pool, narrowing the columns it shares with other words. The quote emerges middle-out.

Why it is in the catalogue

A newspaper classic that reuses the quote corpus discipline the cryptogram established (public-domain lines with attribution), and a puzzle whose failure mode — two valid reconstructions from the same pools — is exactly the kind of thing this workspace insists on proving absent rather than assuming.

The implementation’s guarantees

• Uniqueness is proved, not hoped: the crate’s solver counts reconstructions in which every horizontal run spells a word from the quote’s own bank and every column consumes exactly its pool. A quote is published only at a width where that count is one; the width search nudges the wrap (±4 columns) because the wrap decides whether two same-length words share columns.
• The ambiguity is real, not theoretical: curating the corpus caught two quotes (“WELL DONE IS BETTER THAN WELL SAID” — DONE and SAID swap; a Franklin replacement fell the same way) whose pools genuinely permit two fillings at every tried width. They were replaced, and the curation is a test: every corpus entry must find an unambiguous width.
• Identical words swapping positions produce the identical grid — the solver deduplicates them, which an earlier test learned the hard way.
• Rating basis: deepest_column_pool (2 Easy, 3 Medium, more Hard). The answer key ships the filled grid.