Code

How to spell code

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce code

What does code mean?

1. nounA system of words, letters, or symbols used to represent information secretly or briefly.
2. nounA systematic collection of laws, rules, or standards of conduct.
3. nounThe instructions written in a programming language that a computer carries out.

Code in a sentence

• The spies exchanged messages written in a simple code.

• The builders must follow the local fire safety code.

• The developer spent the afternoon fixing a bug in the code.

• Each product carries a bar code that the scanner reads at the till.

• Every employee signs the company code of conduct on their first day.

• Clean, well-documented code is easier for the next programmer to maintain.

Where does code come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin codex, which originally meant the trunk or block of a tree. Because the Romans wrote on thin wooden tablets coated with wax, codex came to mean a set of such tablets bound together, and then a book, especially a bound volume of laws as opposed to a rolled scroll. Medieval Latin used codex for any systematic body of statutes, and Old French smoothed this into code, which English borrowed in the 1300s to mean a formal collection of laws. From that legal sense the meaning branched outward over the centuries: a 'code' could be any agreed system of rules, then a system of secret signals or substituted symbols, and in the twentieth century the instructions that drive a computer. The short, regular spelling hides this long pedigree, which is why few writers ever stumble over it.

How the word is built

• code (from Latin codex: a tree-trunk, then a wooden tablet, then a book of laws)