Cipher

How to spell cipher

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cipher

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cipher mean?

1. nounA secret or disguised way of writing; a code used to conceal a message.
2. nounA person or thing of no influence or importance; figuratively, a nobody.
3. verbTo put a message into secret code; to encode.

Cipher in a sentence

• noun

  The spy encoded the report using a simple substitution cipher.

• noun

  Without his title he felt like a mere cipher in the company.

• verb

  The clerk had to cipher every order before sending it by telegraph.

• noun

  Analysts spent weeks trying to break the enemy cipher.

• noun

  The junior minister was a political cipher with no real power.

• verb

  Agents were trained to cipher sensitive details by hand.

Where does cipher come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

This word travels back to the Arabic sifr, which literally meant 'empty' or 'zero', the name Arab mathematicians gave to the revolutionary numeral nothing. As Hindu-Arabic numerals spread into Europe, the term passed into Medieval Latin as cifra and then into Old French as cifre before reaching English in the late 1300s. At first it simply meant the figure zero, but because that symbol baffled people unused to the new arithmetic, the word soon acquired the sense of a hidden or secret writing system, a meaning it still carries today. Remarkably, the very same Arabic sifr also gave us the word 'zero' itself, by a separate route through Italian zefiro, so cipher and zero are distant cousins. The 'ph' spelling, which sounds like an 'f', reflects the Latinised form and is the chief trap, since the word is pronounced exactly as if written 'sifer'.

How the word is built

• ciph- (from Arabic sifr: zero, empty)
• -er (noun ending)

British and American spelling

Cipher is the American spelling. British English spells it cypher.