Decipher

How to spell decipher

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce decipher

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does decipher mean?

1. verbTo work out the meaning of something written in code, or something otherwise difficult to read or understand.

Decipher in a sentence

• The analysts spent weeks trying to decipher the encrypted message.

• She struggled to decipher the doctor's untidy handwriting on the form.

Where does decipher come from?

Language of origin: French

The word decipher comes from the French déchiffrer, built from the prefix de-, here meaning to reverse or undo, and chiffre, the French word for a numeral or a coded message. That chiffre traces back through medieval Latin cifra to the Arabic sifr, which literally meant 'empty' or 'zero'. When the concept of zero travelled into Europe with Arabic numerals, the same word came to stand for any secret numerical code, and so chiffre and the English cipher came to mean a coded message. English assembled decipher in the late 1500s to mean exactly the act of converting that secret writing back into plain text. It is worth remembering that the silent journey from sifr also gave us the everyday word zero, so the same root sits behind both 'cipher' and 'zero'; the spelling trap in decipher is simply the soft -ci- spelled with a c, not an s, and the ph for the f sound.

How the word is built

• de- (reverse, undo)
• cipher (code, from Arabic sifr: zero, empty)