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Cipher   Listen
noun
Cipher  n.  
1.
(Arith.) A character (0) which, standing by itself, expresses nothing, but when placed at the right hand of a whole number, increases its value tenfold.
2.
One who, or that which, has no weight or influence. "Here he was a mere cipher."
3.
A character in general, as a figure or letter. (Obs.) "This wisdom began to be written in ciphers and characters and letters bearing the forms of creatures."
4.
A combination or interweaving of letters, as the initials of a name; a device; a monogram; as, a painter's cipher, an engraver's cipher, etc. The cut represents the initials N. W.
5.
A private alphabet, system of characters, or other mode of writing, contrived for the safe transmission of secrets; also, a writing in such characters. "His father... engaged him when he was very young to write all his letters to England in cipher."
Cipher key, a key to assist in reading writings in cipher.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cipher" Quotes from Famous Books



... nothing to the message, but it might mean a good deal to us if we had no other means of discovering the sender. You see that he has begun by writing "The...game...is," and so on. Afterwards he had, to fulfill the prearranged cipher, to fill in any two words in each space. He would naturally use the first words which came to his mind, and if there were so many which referred to sport among them, you may be tolerably sure that he is either ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... But, after considerable reflection, I have come to the conclusion that my talents lie elsewhere. At lugging ledgers I am among the also-rans—a mere cipher. I have been wanting to speak to you about this for some time. If you have no objection, I should like ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse

... done of the courier who rode horseback with orders in his belt and was winged in mid-flight; and the day of the secret messenger who tried to creep through the hostile picket lines with cipher dispatches in his shoe, and was captured and ordered shot at sunrise, is gone, too, except in Civil War melodramas. Modern military science has wiped them out along with most of the other picturesque fol-de-rols of the old game of war. ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... "He cabled to us in cipher," he said; "a cipher which he had composed himself and wrote down for us before he started. The paper has been safely locked up in our strong-room, and it was the only copy in the world, for he told us that, for himself, he should carry the ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... came a telegram in cipher from our chief engineer on the territory of the option: "Young Granton has somehow given us the slip and gone home. We suspect he knows all. But we have not divulged the secret ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... me often and puzzled me long, You've asked me to cipher and spell, You've called me a dunce if I answered wrong, Or a dolt if I failed to tell Just when to say lie and when to say lay, Or what nine sevens may make, Or the longitude of Kamschatka Bay, Or the I-forget-what's-its-name Lake, ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various

... to read, write, and cipher in common arithmetic; had been to the United States, and spoke English quite well. His education was as good as that of three-quarters of the Yankees in California, and his manners and principles a good deal better, and ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... VERSUS Teutsch Ritterdom,—and lasted into the thirteenth year, before it could go out again; out by lack of fuel mainly. One of the fellest wars on record, especially for burning and ruining; above '300,000 fighting-men' are calculated to have perished in it; and of towns, villages, farmsteads, a cipher which makes the fancy, as it were, black and ashy altogether. Ritterdom showed no lack of fighting energy; but that could not save it, in the pass things were got to. Enormous lack of wisdom, of reality and human veracity, there had long been; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... become absorbed little by little in the variety of love's issues. But love, as it is, and should be understood—not the faint ghost that arrays itself in stolen robes, and says, "I am love," but love the strong and the immortal, the passkey to the happy skies, the angel cipher we read, but cannot understand—such love as this, and there is none other true, can find no full solace here, not even ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... thought he had pulverized him in the press (it was soon after the Parnell Commission, when Pigott, the informer, had committed suicide in Spain), Whistler one evening thrust this pleasant note into Mr. Menpes's letter-box, scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, with the well-known butterfly cipher attached: ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz

... extensive changes in labor and in the conditions surrounding home and child life, has since completely altered the face of the earlier educational problem. What was simple once has since become complex, and the complexity has increased with time. Once the ability to read and write and cipher distinguished the educated man from the uneducated; to-day the man or woman who knows only these simple arts is an uneducated person, hardly fit to cope with the struggle for existence in a modern world, and certainly not fitted to participate in the complex political and industrial life ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... corresponding with another; and where a Brother is about to travel, it is the duty of the Grand Master presiding, in the district where he resides, to give him a plain letter of recommendation, with the private qualities in cipher, in a definite manner, that the Grand Master who receives the same may not be deceived; and ofttimes has the poor ninny carried in his supposed letter his death warrant. As the secret of the cipher is not known to any but those of the fraternity who have been promoted ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green

... 390. Almost the only notices of Dryden that make him alive to me I have found in the delicious book of this Polonius-Montaigne, the only man who ever had the courage to keep a sincere journal, even under the shelter of cipher. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... he telegraphed to me, in Chicago, detailing his predicament, and asking instructions. He was much surprised at receiving an answer from Philadelphia, where I then was. I telegraphed him in cipher, congratulating him on his success so far, and told him not to mind the loss of his baggage; but to change his disguise, and rig himself up as a dashing Southerner. Accordingly, the first thing in the morning, he took a bath, had had his face clean shaven, and, going to the clothing and other furnishing ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton

... playing about the eccentricities of cipher, changed in the Seventeenth Century to easily read initials, sometimes interlaced, sometimes apart. Later on it became the mode to weave the entire name. An example of these is the two letters C of Charles de Comans ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... and graceful as that of the finely proportioned house; the numbered paragraphs which follow, setting forth separate details, are like rooms within the house, and—I have just come upon the coincidence with a pleasant start such as might be felt by the discoverer of some complex and important cipher—as there are twenty-seven of the numbered paragraphs in the Declaration, so there are twenty-seven rooms in Monticello. Last of all there are two little phrases in the Declaration (the phrases stating that we shall hold our British brethren in future ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... and cents; suppose in adding up the latter, you find they amount to 27621, you have only to cut off the two right hand figures, and their value stands thus; 276 dollars, 21 cents. To reduce eagles to dollars, add a cipher, and vice versa. To reduce half, and quarter eagles to dollars, you have only to divide by 2 or 4 previous to adding ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest

... every now and then to Abrahamson's hut upon the chance of getting a half-dozen fish for breakfast. He always had a kind word or two for Tom, who during the winter evenings would go over to the good man's house to learn his letters, and to read and write and cipher a little, so that by now he was able to spell the words out of the Bible and the almanac, and knew enough to change ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle

... with Sardis would be kept up, but this communication might be the source of great danger to the plans of Roland Clewe. Whatever messages of importance came from the depths of the arctic regions he wished to come only to him or to Mrs. Raleigh. He had contrived a telegraphic cipher, known only to Mrs. Raleigh, Sammy, and two officers of the Dipsey, and, to insure secrecy, Sammy had been strictly enjoined to send no information in any other way than ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton

... attractions for me; there must be deficiencies in my heaven, to leave room for progression. A realm of unqualified rest were a stagnant pool of being, and the circle of absolute perfection a waveless calm, the abstract cipher of indolence. But I believe I shall be gifted with higher faculties, greater powers, and therefore be capable of higher aspirations, better achievements, and a nobler appreciation of ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney

... was falling now in big, slow flakes, a great fire blazing under the chimney with its cipher and enigmatic motto, as they sat down to the leek-soup, the hard eggs, and the salad grown and gathered by their host's own hands. The long stone passages through which they passed from church, with the narrow brown doors of the monks' dormitories one ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... of rebellion, Jack returned to his books and lessons in Parson Throckmorton's garden. The learning already acquired he began to pass on to Joe Hawkridge, who was a zealous pupil and determined to read and write and cipher without letting the grass grow under his feet. It was this young pirate's ambition to make a shipping merchant of himself, and Councilor Forbes found him employment in a warehouse where the planters ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... Roger," said Harry; "be not over-hasty, lad. I believe this is more important than it looks. May it not be a cipher of some kind? Let us have another ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... can," said Jonas. "The first evening, Amos may take the arithmetic and the slate, and cipher, while Isabella writes, and Oliver studies a good long spelling lesson. Then, the second evening, Amos shall study the spelling lesson, and ...
— Jonas on a Farm in Winter • Jacob Abbott

... rendered it incumbent on us to express an opinion, at least, in favour of the German people, or we must be thought to take part with their rulers. He could not recommend a foolish and hasty interference with foreign states, yet he could not consent that England should be a cipher in the political combinations of Europe, looking with indifference on the continent, as though no changes could affect her interests. And if there was any one thing more than another which immediately affected British interests, he thought it was the fate of Germany. Unite that country ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... called into public life for a short time. President Adams had sent three commissioners to France. The French Minister, Talleyrand, treated them ill, and sent secret agents to them to let them know that nothing would be done until they paid large bribes. The three Americans sent home cipher dispatches in which they told how they had been received. President Adams thought best to publish these dispatches, putting the letters X, Y, and Z in place of the names of the secret agents. These papers came to be known as the X, Y, and Z dispatches, and they ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various

... had been at work with his slow but accurate thought, framing in secret the most momentous document in American history since the Declaration of Independence. He did this in the cipher-room of the War Department telegraph office, where he was accustomed to spend anxious hours waiting for news from the boys at the front, and also to seek what rest he could in thus hiding away from the never-ending stream of tormentors, office-seekers, ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers

... Democrates was not drinking wine at his betrothal feast, but sending this cipher letter by a swift and trusty "distance-runner" ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... but it was like a key to a cipher. Instantly there flashed over my mind all that I had heard or read of that strange ritual which seduced Israel to sin. I saw a sunburnt land and a people vowed to the stern service of Jehovah. But I saw, too, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... of the great justiciary and of the chancellor, to whose hands chiefly the administration of justice was committed: and, if we may credit the historian,[*] they had formed the plan of other limitations, as well as of associations to maintain them, which would have reduced the king to be an absolute cipher, and have held the crown in perpetual pupillage and dependence. The king, to satisfy them, would agree to nothing but a renewal of the charter, and a general permission to excommunicate all the violators of it; and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... Learn to send and receive slowly in an hour or less. In a day you can telegraph in a jiffy, any message, punctuation, numbers, sentence-signals and the whole business. Every boy a telegrapher. Fun to make your own Cipher Codes on this as a basis. Complete, postpaid 6c., ...
— How Two Boys Made Their Own Electrical Apparatus • Thomas M. (Thomas Matthew) St. John

... in a drunken dance with half the letters of the alphabet—the explanation of the map, I supposed, in cipher, and as it might prove the clue to this dreadful business, I folded the sheet carefully in an envelope and placed ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... wrongly, have stuck to the policy of absolute denial. I'm not so sure. There have been hints, indiscreet allusions, that seem to indicate that the menace is a real one. The position is much as though they had got hold of an incriminating document, but couldn't read it because it was in cipher—but we know that the draft treaty wasn't in cipher—couldn't be in the nature of things—so that won't wash. But there's SOMETHING. Of course, Jane Finn may be dead for all we know—but I don't think so. The curious thing ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie

... of February, 1796, Tone, who had sailed from Belfast the previous June, arrived at Havre from New York, possessed of a hundred guineas and some useful letters of introduction. One of these letters, written in cipher, was from the French Minister at Philadelphia to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles Lacroix; another was to the American Minister in France, Mr. Monroe, afterwards President of the United States, by whom he was most ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... abstruse Institution.—"JARNI-BLEU!" snuffles the Feldzeugmeister to himself. But "SI DEUS EST NOBISCUM," as Grumkow exclaims once to his beautiful Reichenbach, or NOSTI as he calls him in their slang or cipher language, "If God is with us, who can prevail against us?" For the Grumkow can quote Scripture; nay solaces himself with it, which is a feat beyond what the Devil is ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle

... table-knives and a plated egg-stand. When the lady's-maid took a walk in the course of the afternoon, she found she had occasion for eight cambric pocket-handkerchiefs, (marked with her mistress's cipher), half-a-dozen pair of shoes, gloves, long and short, some silk stockings, and a gold-headed scent-bottle. "Both the new cashmeres is gone," said she, "and there's nothing left in Mrs. Walker's trinket-box but a paper of pins and an old coral bracelet." As for the ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... him almost before the ink was dry. The reply came by return of post: "It is almost, or quite, as good as can be. Send me another." So forthwith I sent him 'God's Garrison', and it was quickly followed by 'The Three Outlaws', 'The Tall Master', 'The Flood', 'The Cipher', 'A Prairie Vagabond', and several others. At length came 'The Stone', which brought a telegram of congratulation, and finally 'The Crimson Flag'. The acknowledgment of that was a postcard containing these all too-flattering ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... she left him what money had come to her from her father, which he disposed of for charitable ends, and an immense quantity of MS. in cipher—a cipher which is evidently identical with that he used himself in the annotations he put under innumerable sketches he was allowed to make during his long period of confinement, which (through her interest, and no doubt through his own good ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... am I must remain. I haven't what's called a principle of growth." Making marks in the earth with her umbrella she appeared to cipher it out. "I'm about as good as I can be—and about as bad. If Mr. Longdon can't make ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... maid, with her quaint, wistful touch of womanhood, sit beside Dic on the ciphering log inside the fireplace, listening to him read from one of Billy Little's books, watching him trace continents, rivers, and mountains on a map, or helping him to cipher a complicated problem in arithmetic. The girl by no means understood all that Dic read, but she tried, and even though she failed, she would clasp her hands and say, "Isn't it grand, Dic?" And it was grand to her because Dic ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... no signature. Her orders or suggestions were written in the same cipher, and required much more time and thought than had been given to the buying and freeing of Pluto's pickaninny, after which she destroyed all unnecessary writings, and retired with the satisfied feeling of good work done and better in prospect, and in a short time was sleeping the calm, ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan

... prevent it. The rebel might not come home, or the note might have been written with the intention of having it intercepted, in order to throw the one into whose hands it might fall on the wrong scent; or it might be written in cipher, and mean directly opposite to what Frank had supposed. But he consoled himself with the thought that he had done, and would still continue to do, all in his power to obey the admiral's general order, and if he failed, the blame would not rest ...
— Frank on the Lower Mississippi • Harry Castlemon

... flowery letters to distinguished women are preserved. On one occasion he wrote to a certain countess, informing her that he was composing a secret cipher for a key to their correspondence, and added: "I beseech you to accept the within lock (of hair). I am sorry that it is now eighteen inches shorter than it was three ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood

... too, sir," said Jermyn. "He saved my book of cipher correspondence yesterday. We should have been in trouble if that had got into the ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield

... Helena until his death. He took a sketch of the dead emperor in full profile, which was engraved in England and France, and considered a striking likeness. He was meanwhile no doubt perfecting the code of signals for the use of merchant vessels of all nations, including the cipher for secret correspondence, which was immediately adopted, and secured to its inventor the Cross of the Legion of Honour from Louis Philippe. It was not actually published in book form till 1837, from which date its sale produced an ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat

... attainments. Through success he will be honored by the members of his profession. He will be praised by all other people, and above all he will in the silent thoughts of his own mind have the satisfaction and pleasure of knowing that he is not a cipher in the vast human family. He will be pointed out as an example to those who are perhaps bowed down by discouragement. He will in all probability be called lucky when his success is really due to decisions that are arrived at by the experience and close observation ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... add some further remarks on the subject of the Arabic numerals and cipher; as neither the querists nor respondents seem to have duly appreciated the immense importance of the step taken by introducing the use of a cipher. I would commence with observing, that we know ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various

... to be called a missionary of good. Grant this,—then allow, on the average, five minutes of merriment to each reader of each issue of Punch,—then multiply these 5 minutes by—say 50,000, and this again by 52 weeks, and this, finally, by 17 years, and thus cipher out, if you have a tolerably capacious imagination, the amount of happiness which has flowed and spread, like a river of gladness, through the world, from that inexhaustible, bubbling, and sparkling fountain, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... lonely lives, rejoiced in her, wondered at her, delighted in the imperious ways she had learned from their spoiling. There had been teachers to educate her, but it was an open secret that they had not taught her much. Susan did not take kindly to books. No one had ever been able to teach her how to cipher and learning the piano had been a fruitless effort abandoned in her fifteenth year. It is only just to her to say that she had her little talents. She was an excellent housekeeper, and she could cook certain dishes better, the doctor said, than the chefs ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... had been in force ever since the days of the London Company, this entitled him to a grant of two thousand acres of land. After securing the patent, he changed the record with his own hand by adding one cipher each to the forty and the two thousand, making them four hundred and twenty thousand respectively. In this way he obtained ten times as much land as he was entitled to and despite the fact that the fraud was notorious at the time, so great was his influence ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker

... intricate mechanism of the underworld is at work to assist us! I tell you as little as possible, but I neglect nothing. All communications in cipher, and you can see that the telegraph clerks think we are ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson

... occurrences—mere freaks of childhood. They would certainly be so regarded in countries where the nation practically possesses self-government and the Crown is mainly an ornamental cipher, or where the sovereign privilege is at least largely circumscribed by the parliamentary power. It is different in an Empire like Russia, with its murderous dynastic antecedents. There, the personal character of the princely personages is of the utmost importance; ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... culture, and could not be taught reading or arithmetic. Dr. Liebeault submitted him to many hypnotic sittings, making a very great effort to rouse his attention, though he seemed to have no capacity for being instructed. Finally he succeeded so well that after two months he could read, and could cipher in the four rules of arithmetic. A great number of similar cases were treated by Dr. Dumont at Nancy ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various

... telegraph-operator of the cipher telegrams at Washington, in the Executive residence, took the despatch announcing the nomination of Andrew Jackson, of Tennessee, to the vice-presidency with Lincoln for the second term. The latter read it carefully, and ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... intelligence; and when he asked to be allowed to pay for himself by working overtime, his master readily agreed,—for it promised more work to be done, for which he could allow the slave just what he pleased. Of course, he knew now that when the black man began to cipher this state of affairs would be changed; but it would mean such an increase of profit from the outside, that he could afford to give up his own little peculations. Anyway, it would be many years before the slave could pay the two thousand dollars, which price he had set upon him. Should he approach ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... our predecessors in this country, in all other countries of the earth, is entirely wasted. We live—that is, we snatch an existence—and ourworks become nothing. The piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of immense commerce, ends in a cipher. These objects are so outside my idea that I cannot understand them, and look upon the struggle in amazement. Not even the pressure of poverty can force upon me an understanding of, and sympathy with, these ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... enough," answered Dr. Rochecliffe. "Every man to his tools—thou to thy bugle-horn, and I to my papers in cipher.—But do not be discouraged; it is the frost on the ground, and the number of roots, which rendered our task difficult. And now, all due rites done to this unhappy man, and having read over him the service of the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... immediately, at once, without delay," she said. "There's supposed to be an answer. Chicken, some queer things happen in this business. Here's that weak-eyed, hollow-chested Saunders, that seems to have just life enough to put in about ten hours a day reading 'The Duchess,' getting cipher messages like the hero of a detective story. And sending them, too, by the way. We operators are not supposed to think; but all the same—" She got her receipt-book, filled rapidly a blank line, tucked it under her arm, and went up and tapped Evadna lightly upon the head with the ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... business, spent many hours each day with the ministers and dependants of the court, corresponded with foreign lands, with her brother the Emperor Leopold, and her sister, Queen Caroline of Naples, wrote to them in a cipher intelligible only to them, and sent the letters through the hands of secret agents, imploring of them assistance ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... you, Cyrus?" said Dr. Lavendar, looking at him over his spectacles. (Dr. Lavendar, in his wicked old heart, always wanted to call this young man Cipher; but, so far, grace had been given him to withstand temptation.) "What's wrong?" ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors

... is in the archives at Simancas partly in cipher. It was discovered and deciphered by Bergenroth and published in the Calendar of State Papers, Spanish Series, I., pp. 176-177. The Spanish text was published by Harrisse, Jean et Sebastien Cabot, pp. 329-330, and in Weare, Cabot's Discovery, ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various

... "Court of the Ages." He was overruled because the officials deemed the name not in accord with the contemporaneous spirit of the Exposition. They called it the "Court of Abundance." In spite of the name, however, it is not the Court of Abundance. Mullgardt's title gives a key to the cipher of the statues. Read by it, the groups on the altar of the Tower become three successive Ages of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... hold berths to be dismissed, and the government to be entirely in the hands of natives. It is a sort of national movement, with the army at the head of it; and the viceroy, although still nominally the ruler of Egypt, is in fact little more than a cipher in the hands of Arabi and the colonels. They say the French are at the bottom of it, and it is likely enough. They have always been jealous of our influence in Egypt. However, I do not suppose we shall interfere in the matter, unless they break regularly ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty

... say ye hev applied fur the place o' postmaster?" Tyler prosed on. "All that takes a power o' knowledge—readin' an' writin' an' cipher-in' an' sech. How air ye expectin' to hold out, 'kase I know ye never hed no mo' larnin' than me, an' I war acquainted with ye till ye war thirty years ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... Republican Senate, meanwhile, had prepared a counterblast. By legal proceedings a committee had obtained from the Western Union Telegraph Company over thirty thousand of the telegrams sent by both parties during the campaign. The Republicans declared that the "cipher despatches" among these messages showed that the Democrats had offered a substantial bribe for the vote of an Oregon Republican elector. Before the dispatches were returned to the telegraph company, somebody took the precaution to destroy those that concerned ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... end that he might cast out of his heart, for all time, the love for a woman which had crept in. Sleep had dared not come within range of that titanic struggle. Worn with the battle which had witnessed his defeat, he had just completed his cipher message, when, following a modest knock at the door, Josef entered complacently with the ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real. Such a book being there was wonderful enough; but still more astounding were the notes pencilled in the margin, and plainly referring to the text. I couldn't believe my eyes! They were in cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher. Fancy a man lugging with him a book of that description into this nowhere and studying it—and making notes—in cipher at that! It was an ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... test the play of "Julius Caesar" has a glowing future ahead of it. It was written by Gentlemen Shakespeare, Bacon and Donnelly, who collaborated together on it. Shakespeare did the lines and plot, Bacon furnished the cipher and Donnelly called attention to it through ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... took place in June. Ten weeks afterward Boylan came in with the big news, and found Lonegan bending over the following cablegram, almost the last that came through in the private cipher of The States: ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort

... one who had charge; no one was hindering her. Have the marriage as soon as possible? He was a mere cipher, and there was no reason for asking his advice. But steady, shucks! He had to work; he had to go out. And when he saw Josephina leaving the studio to weep somewhere else, he gave a snort of satisfaction, glad to have escaped from this ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... the Moros supply the Spaniards with provisions. Lavezaris asks that more married men be sent to the islands. Some remarkably fine pearls have been obtained near Bantayan. He asks the viceroy to provide him with a cipher code for ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 - Volume III, 1569-1576 • E.H. Blair

... is an article, put a cipher in the place, and 'carry' the tens. If there is no figure to 'carry' them to, write ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous

... busy whisper circling round Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned. Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault; The village{8} all declared how much he knew; 'Twas certain he could write, and cipher too; Lands he could measure, terms and tides{9} presage, And e'en the story ran that he could gauge:{10} In arguing, too, the parson owned his skill; For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still; While words of learned length ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin

... is no worse than the rest, believe me. What does any master care for a man's life? Profit and loss go down in figures; but life—that's a cipher in ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... from civilians, and he depends on his own sources for information. I am here because he sent me to 'Go, look, see,' and report. I have been wiring him ever since you started from the coast, and since you became president. Your censor has very kindly allowed me to use our cipher." ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... simply repeating the rumours that are abroad, and cites several different versions that are current, adding that the truth of the affair is not known to anybody. His conclusions, however, particularly those given in cipher, point to Cesare Borgia as the perpetrator of the deed, and hint at some such motive of retaliation for an attempt upon his own life as that which is given by the ambassador ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... XV.'s time; while "Pandolphe" wears a flowing wig under his cocked hat, and sits on a throne in rococo style. A copy of the book was purchased for the royal library, and is still to be seen at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, with the crown and cipher of his Most Christian ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand

... "A cipher!" said Heideck. "But we shall soon get to the bottom of it. You have some capable interpreters at your disposal, and it might be a good thing if they set to ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann

... memoranda, certain writings in cipher, others in foreign characters, pieces of drawings, maps and the like, all of which I destroyed. It contained also, in thin foreign notes, a sum large beyond the belief of what an ordinary officer would carry into battle; and this money, for the ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... just received a telegram from Washington. Great excitement at the embassy. Cipher telegram has been despatched to the Titan Iron Works. One of my men in Washington reports a queer experience. He had been following one of the members of the embassy staff, who saw he was being shadowed, turned suddenly on the man, and exclaimed, "Why are you hounding ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... it was labeled in full, I was surprised they had spared. Precious letters I found under heaps of broken china and rags; all my notes were gone, with many letters. I looked for a letter of poor ——, in cipher, with the key attached, and name signed in plain hand. I knew it would hardly be agreeable to him to have it read, and it certainly would be unpleasant to me to have it published; but I could not find it. Miriam thinks she saw something answering ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... two Mr. Taggett stood paralyzed. Ten minutes afterwards a message in cipher was pulsing along the wires to New York, and before the sun went down that evening Richard Shackford was under the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... volumes, (published in 1727, but afterwards increased by a fourth in 1732,) though in itself a trifling work, had one vast consequence. It drew after it swarms of libels and lampoons, levelled almost exclusively at Pope, although the cipher of the joint authors stood entwined upon the title-page. These libels in their turn produced a second reaction; and, by stimulating Pope to effectual anger, eventually drew forth, for the everlasting admiration of posterity, the very greatest ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... wrong? Who can decide? Have beasts or men most claim to live? God wots! He is the unit, we the cipher-dots. Ranged in the order a great hunt should have, They soon between the trunks espy the cave. "Yes, that is it! the very mouth of the den!" The trees all round it muttered, warning men; Still they kept step and neared it. Look you now, Company's ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... of these intrigues, the King agreed to send for Lord Wilmington, and to place him at the head of the ministry. It is remarkable that this man, who was a mere cipher, should have been again had recourse to, after his failure in making a government at the very commencement of the reign of George the Second, when his manifest incapacity, and the influence of Queen Caroline, had occasioned the remaining of his opponent ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... young Mr. Cipher walked into the dentist's office instead of the doctor's. "Doctor," he groaned, "I'm in bad shape. My head aches all the time, and I can't do anything with it." "Yes, yes," said Doctor Toothaker, cheerfully. "I see; big cavity in it; must be hollow; you'll need to have it filled." And, ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various

... that I have made it quite plain to you that we're down and out. I have about as much weight in financial circles as a second-story man, and am regarded in much the same light, while you are as important as a cipher ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... but had delicately avoided to declare him expressly deposed. The judges drew, however, this indelicate conclusion; the conclusion they drew was founded upon the premises; it was very just and logical; for they declared that he was a mere cipher. They commended Mr. Hastings's delicacy, though they did not imitate it; but they pronounced sentence of deposition upon the said Nabob, and they declared that any letter or paper that was produced ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... if anything, a slight look of shame; and Richter himself could not rouse him again. Readers who have any tincture of Psychology know how much is to be inferred from this; and that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad. How much lies in Laughter: the cipher-key, wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies a cold glitter as of ice: the fewest are able to laugh, what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snigger from the throat outwards; or at best, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... a Cuban cigar-maker to fix up a little cipher code with English and Spanish words, and gave the General a copy, so we could cable him bulletins about the election, or for more money, and then we were ready to start. General Rompiro escorted us to the steamer. On the pier ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... Cluny Castle. In approaching Linlithgow from Edinburgh, we found the provost and magistrates in their gorgeous robes at the hotel to receive us. I was with them when Mr. Blaine came into the room with a cablegram in his hand which he showed to me, asking what it meant. It read: "Use cipher." It was from Senator Elkins at the Chicago Convention. Mr. Blaine had cabled the previous day, declining to accept the nomination for the presidency unless Secretary Sherman of Ohio agreed, and Senator Elkins no doubt wished to be certain that ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... demanded from the council of state the command of the troops and the disposal of the revenues. The answer was a simple reference to the Pacification of Ghent; and the prince's rejoinder was an apparent submission, and the immediate despatch of letters in cipher to the king, demanding a supply of troops sufficient to restore his ruined authority. These letters were intercepted by the king of Navarre, afterward Henry IV. of France, who immediately transmitted them to the Prince of Orange, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... every one admit that your world was a paradise of order, equity, and felicity. But they were a very practical people, my contemporaries, and after expressing their admiration for the moral beauty and material splendor of the system, they would presently begin to cipher and ask how you got the money to make everybody so happy; for certainly, to support the whole nation at a rate of comfort, and even luxury, such as I see around me, must involve vastly greater wealth than the nation ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... him, that he should not be obliged to be a witness against any person, and that he himself should be pardoned. Unfortunately, by a sheer accident in disclosing the meaning of some of the ciphers used in Argyle's correspondence, he put the Council {204} on the track of the cipher[20] which expressed the name of his fellow-prisoner, the famous Carstares, who, however, does not in any way blame Mr Spence for what happened. He was sent back to prison, strict orders being given that he was not to be permitted to see Carstares, and when the Council adjourned ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... wants to be acknowledged a moral, responsible being. She is seeking not to be governed by laws in the making of which she has no voice. She is deprived of almost every right in civil society, and is a cipher in the nation, except in the right of presenting a petition. In religious society her disabilities have greatly retarded her progress. Her exclusion from the pulpit or ministry, her duties marked out for her by her equal brother man, subject to creeds, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... English agent—who is a man with a considerable future before him, unless some complaint of the throat carries him off before his time. He had charge of all arrangements at Liverpool, whilst I was stationed at the inn at Kenyon, where I awaited a cipher signal to act. When the special was arranged for, my agent instantly telegraphed to me and warned me how soon I should have everything ready. He himself under the name of Horace Moore applied immediately for a special also, in the hope that he would ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Commons, with whom he was bound by every party principle, in matters of delicacy and importance, confidentially to communicate, thought proper to send Mr. Adair, as his representative, and with his cipher, to St. Petersburg, there to frustrate the objects for which the minister from the crown was authorized to treat. He succeeded in this his design, and did actually frustrate the king's minister in some of the objects of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... not wholly their fault; a very creditable pride kept David from hinting that he was in need of help, which indeed became the fact. The little patrimony had dwindled to a cipher. Clients were few and commissions small. But David, less from design than from habit and taste, maintained the front of prosperity. He had the trick of wearing clothes well, lived in nice ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller

... Southwick said. "We got instructions to pack up a pretty strange assortment of supplies for the Scorpius, and that's all I know. The order was in special cipher, though, so we're all ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin

... on Miss Tonk's card the small purple cipher that stood for hm—hm. "I will make enquiries about her address," ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson

... speed as we could make to Amida, a city celebrated at a later period for the disaster which befel it. And when our scouts had rejoined us there we found in one of their scabbards a scrap of parchment written in cipher, which they had been ordered to convey to us by Procopius, whom I have already spoken of as ambassador to the Persians with the Count Lucillianus; its terms were purposely obscure, lest if the bearers should be taken prisoners, and the sense of the writing understood, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... arrival, a boy of her own age. His name was Ethan French; and he had come from Illinois with Mr. Grant to work on the farm. He had no parents living, and was expected to remain with his employer till he was twenty-one. He was an uncouth fellow, and though he could read, write, and cipher, he seemed to be as uncultivated and bearish as the wild Indians that roamed through the country. Fanny tried to be his friend, and never neglected an opportunity to do him a kindness; but the more she tried ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic

... monk of the Order of the Barnabites, which has given Doctors and Saints without number to the Church. It is only a half-truth to refer its origin to St. Charles Borromeo; we must account as the true founder the Apostle St. Paul, whose cipher it bears on its arms. I have been compelled to quit my cloister, now headquarters of the Section du Pont-Neuf, and ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... not simply an exponent of the impersonal state of things, it is a power toward bringing such a state of things about. A hermit seldom develops to his full possibilities, and the domestic variety is no exception to the rule. A man who is linked to some one that toward him remains a cipher lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth, nor is he more favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors have been ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... street duel the local representative of the Associated Press had his story on the wire, and at eight-thirty next morning T. Morgan Carey, in his club at Los Angeles, read the glad tidings. By nine o'clock a cipher telegram from Carey was being clicked off to his tool in the General Land Office at Washington, instructing him to expedite the listing of the applications of Bob McGraw's clients for lieu land ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... or velvets flushed with the bloom of age—gave him sensations like those her own beauty had once roused in him. But the next moment he was laughing over some commonplace joke, or absorbed in a long cipher cable handed to him as they re-entered the Nouveau Luxe for tea, and his aesthetic emotions had been thrust back into their own compartment of the great steel ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... Eminent Victorians is pleased to describe "poor Mr. Russell" as little better than a fly buzzing in Manning's "spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy." It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in address, he was by no means deficient in decision or force of character, as was evidenced when, some months later, he explained to Mr. Gladstone his reasons for stating to Bismarck, without instructions from the government, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... something of a fatalist, did not interfere. On this cockleshell of a craft, among these rude spirits of alien races, he was powerless. On land a diplomat and strategist of high order, here he was a cipher. Moreover, he was beaten to his knees, and he knew it. The arrival of the warship had upset his calculations. After many months' planning of flight, he had been forced, by the events of a few hours, into an aggressive ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... rank poison," she said while wading through the stubble behind uncle Nat's barn on her way home, "but her name is Farnham, and it'd be mean as a nigger and meaner too for me to say a word about that document; let Judge Sharp cipher out his own sums if he wants to, I ain't a-going ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... your reach! You have no ambition but to strum that banjo, roar ridiculous songs, fuss up like a tailor's dummy, and pester your comrades, or drag them down to Jerry's for the eats! You won't be earnest, you Human Cipher, Before you entered Bannister, you formed your ideas and ideals of campus life from colored posters, moving-pictures, magazine stories, and stage dramas like 'Brown of Harvard"; you have surely lived up, or down, to those ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice

... of north, south, east, and west, the table around the well, and at a level with the compass, was marked out into alternate spaces of red and black, bearing—one on each space—the figures from 1 to 36, and ending in 0, so that in all there were thirty-seven spaces, the one bearing the cipher being opposite to the strange woman who presided. As the game began again the players staked their money on one or another of these spaces. I also gathered that they could stake on either black or red, or again on one of the three dozens— 1 to 12, 13 to 24, 25 to 36. When all the money was ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... several minutes. At length she answered, "I will give you a claim upon Lord Sunbury;" and she took from her finger a large ring, such as were commonly worn in those days, presenting on one side a shield of black enamel surrounded with brilliants, and in the centre a cipher, formed also of small diamonds. "Keep this," said the lady, "till all is explained to you, Wilton, and then return it to me. Should the Earl's assistance be required in anything of vital importance, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust, and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose—and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... later Pierrette had a writing-master. She was taught to read, write, and cipher. Enormous injury was thus supposed to be done to the Rogrons' house. Ink-spots were found on the tables, on the furniture, on Pierrette's clothes; copy-books and pens were left about; sand was scattered everywhere, books were torn and dog's-eared as the result of these lessons. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... the next and the next until he had run through the whole bunch. Desmond, peering over his shoulder, caught a glimpse of rows of figures, very neatly set out in a round hand and knew that he was looking at a message in cipher code. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams

... before. I have hopes of sending the present by a Mr. Jarvis, who went from hence to Holland some time ago. About this date, I suppose him to be at Brussels, and that from thence he will inform me, whether, in his way to Madrid, he will pass by this place. If he does, this shall be accompanied by a cipher for our future use; if he does not, I must still await a safe opportunity. Mr. Jarvis is a citizen of the United States from New-York, a gentleman of intelligence, in the mercantile line, from whom you will be ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... and the gentry likes him vastly, for he understands the measurement of land and timber, knows how to make dials and such things; and for ciphering few can outdo 'en." "Ay!" says the gentleman, "he does look like a cipher indeed, for he did not speak three words all last night." The ostler now produced the boots, which the gentleman taking in his hand, and having placed himself in the chair, addressed in the following speech: "My good friends, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding



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