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verb
Cipher  v. i.  (past & past part. ciphered; pres. part. ciphering)  To use figures in a mathematical process; to do sums in arithmetic. "'T was certain he could write and cipher too."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cipher" Quotes from Famous Books



... inferior to his wife in point of social evolution, for she had learned, from certain episodes which still filled her with mortification, that fibbing was bad form. To Mrs. Lloyd Avalons, her husband was a mere cipher. Placed before her, he added nothing to her value; placed after and in the background, he multiplied her importance tenfold. There were certain privileges accruing to a woman with a husband, certain immunities that followed in the ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray

... of whom we know nothing, until with their axes they cut their Runic signs into a few of these stones, which then came into the calendar of time. But as for me, I had gone quite beyond all lapse of time, and had become a cipher and a nothing. Then three or four beautiful falling stars came down, which cleared the air, and gave my thoughts another direction. You know what a falling star is, do you not? The learned men are not at all ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... mixed architecture, but on the whole, though composed of the styles of the different ages when it had received additions, had a striking and imposing effect. An immense gate, composed of rails of hammered iron, with many a flourish and scroll, displaying as its uppermost ornament the ill-fated cipher of C. R., was now decayed, being partly wasted with ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... as one may call the kind I am speaking of. Think of them muzzling about in the rily water, free as air; then turn to your learned pig, chained to a master by the forced action of its own intellect—poor thing! obliged to play cards with its fore-foot, teach geography, and cipher out numbers like a schoolmaster—and then say if ignorance isn't bliss! Look in the little black eyes of the animal, and see the sad and hungry look that ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... women—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old—who read ST. NICHOLAS, who understand the most complex vulgar fractions, who cipher out logarithms "just for fun," who chatter familiarly about "Kickero" and "luliuse Kiser," and can bang a piano dumb and helpless in fifteen minutes—they, I suppose, will think me frivolous and unaspiring ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various

... many languages. Whether his facts were in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, or English made apparently no difference. Nor did he stop at what was in plain language. He read a diary written chiefly in symbols, and many letters in cipher. A large part of his material was in manuscript, which entailed greater labor than if it had been in print. As one reads the prefaces to his various volumes and his footnotes, amazement is the word to express the feeling that a man could have accomplished so much in ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... these demands went altogether beyond the rights of the Commons, and that if the king submitted to them the power of the country would be solely in their hands, while he himself would become a cipher, he had no course open to him but to refuse assent, and to appeal to the loyal nobility ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty

... note sent to him by devious methods, he has once or twice given me advance information which has been of value—that highest value which anticipates and prevents rather than avenges crime. I cannot doubt that, if we had the cipher, we should find that this communication is of the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... Rosemary, he was swearing Jubilates in the privacy of his working-den state-room, having tri-daily weather reports wired to him by way of Carbonate and Argentine station, and busying himself in the intervals with sending and receiving sundry mysterious telegrams in cipher. ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde

... he was probably on the point of giving you up. I judge that from certain letters of yours in that telegraph cipher which I found ...
— The Crime of the French Cafe and Other Stories • Nicholas Carter

... integrity, for he is a real man. He has wholeness, completeness, soundness, and roundness. He is an integer and never counts for less than one in any relation of life. He cannot be a mere cipher, for he is dynamic. He rings true at every impact of life, is free from dross and veneer, and is genuine through and through. There was arithmetic, back along the line somewhere, but it has been absorbed in the big quality which it helped ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... anything of this," he said. "It's some sort of a note, written in cipher, I should judge. It is ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope

... 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 he hugged Denver around the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... Did it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... 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 ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... strength of character. His existence was passed among a set of idle courtiers. He had placed himself and his broken fortunes in the hands of the ambitious La Tremoille, whose object it was that the King should be a mere cipher in his hands, and who lulled him into a false security by encouraging him to continue a listless career of self-indulgence in his various palaces and pleasure castles on the banks of the Loire. Charles had, indeed, become a mere tool ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower

... cipher, which he had agreed upon with Valerius to indicate that the commendatio was not to be looked upon as a ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... then we come across interesting things, though. For instance, I discovered a most original cipher the other day." ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... assertion proved nothing but extreme self-satisfaction. Accordingly, as she could not afford to send her daughters to school as well as the boys, she decided to educate them herself. Everybody who could read, write, and cipher was supposed to be able to teach in those days, and Mrs. Caldwell undertook the task without a doubt of her own capacity. But Aunt Victoria ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... subtle news I bring with me, count," replied Count Lesle, "and of such a tender, delicate nature that we could not willingly entrust it to paper, even in cipher, but could only transmit it from my lips to your ear, and thence to the locked-up recesses of your breast. Therefore I have come to you, and need hardly say that not a breath of our conversation is to escape, and that nobody must know of my having been here. The question ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach

... 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

... my father, with unusual animation; "I did not know it was allowed. I'll wire you in the office cipher, and we'll make it a kind of partnership business, Loudon:—Dodd and Son, eh?" and he patted my shoulder and repeated, "Dodd and Son, Dodd and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... binoculars or telescope, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, for him to write down each letter as it comes, and as this is absolutely required in military work, where nearly everything is in code or cipher, the services of a second man are needed to write down the letters as the first calls ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride

... 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, seeing his ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various

... glancing first at the telegram and then at the book, and writing apparently one letter or figure at a time. Dodds was interested, for he knew exactly what the man was doing. He was working out a cipher. Dodds had often done it himself. And then suddenly the little man turned very pale, as if the full purport of the message had been a shock to him. Dodds had done that also, and his sympathies were all with his neighbours. Then the stranger rose, and, leaving his breakfast ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Piccadilly together, and there, standing at the kerb, I saw a car that caused my heart to bound with delight—a magnificent six-cylinder forty horse-power "Napier," of the very latest model. The car was open, with side entrance, a dark green body with coronet and cipher on the panels, upholstered in red, with glass removable screen to the splashboard—a splendid, workmanlike car just suitable for long tours and fast runs. Of all the cars and of all the makes, that was the only one which it was my ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux

... to order a fickle and divided nation. Strong-handed, but weak-headed,—a capital man of action, but valueless at the council-board,—Murat's place was at the head of charging squadrons. There he was a host in himself; in the cabinet he was a cipher. He was not equal even to the organisation of the troops whom, in the field, he so effectively handled. His good nature rendered him unwilling to refuse a favour, and, as there were no fixed and stringent regulations for the appointment and promotion of officers, the higher posts of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various

... heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine that Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman or a German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a light bursts upon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of Mrs. Gallup and the Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the matter of a capital letter. I withdraw my objections; I accept everything; bacon did ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... coarser needlework, and such other things as she would require to know when she came to be a woman; but carelessly allowed her to gather up the crumbs of such instruction as he bestowed on her playmate Ned, and thus learn to read, write, and cipher; which, to say the truth, was about as far in the way of scholarship as little Elsie ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... hastened to the telegraph office, and a cipher message, containing in brief all he had thus far learned, was soon upon ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton

... been of a slight nor an agreeable kind. I made it a rule to read everything that has been written respecting Napoleon, and I have had to decipher many of his autograph documents, though no longer so familiar with his scrawl as formerly. I say decipher, because a real cipher might often be much more readily understood than the handwriting of Napoleon. My own notes, too, which were often very hastily made, in the hand I wrote in my youth, have sometimes also much ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... chocolate. They were from the king's musicians, and sung their wares, accompanied by music, at the sides of the booths, and had pages to serve the guests. The booths were splendidly painted and gilded, adorned with lusters and flowers, and bore the arms and cipher of Mme. la Duchesse de Bourgogne. At the back of each booth a large mirror reflected the whole. . . . The Duchesse de Bourgogne left this hall, after the collation, delighted with all that she had seen and heard. Since ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne

... twenty-one volumes of manuscript correspondence between the governments of Rome and Venice, from the time of Pope Paul Caraffa downwards. Monsignor Molsa, a great friend of the late professor, knowing of these volumes, which were in cipher, with their interpretations, hastened to tell Cardinal Antonelli, who dispatched orders just in time to save the secrets of the state from further exposure. Sarti died ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... came about in the most natural way. We catch our first glimpse of the boy when he sat in a little log school-house, without windows or floor, one of a humming score of shoeless boys, where a good-natured, irritable, drinking English schoolmaster taught him to read, write, and cipher as far as Practice. This was the only school he ever attended, and that was all he learned at it. His widowed mother, with her seven young children, her little farm, and two or three slaves, could do no more for him. Next, we ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... obedience which pleased his superiors; and it was to this quality that he owed at a later period his promotion to the rank of sub-director. His routine habits then became great experience; his manners and his silence concealed his lack of education, and his absolute nullity was a recommendation, for a cipher was needed. The government was afraid of displeasing both parties in the Chamber by selecting a man from either side; it therefore got out of the difficulty by resorting to the rule of seniority. That ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... 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

... send a cipher dispatch to London if you like, Mr. Hargreave," said the Minister Petkoff, as we sat over our cigars. "The documents will be all signed at the Cabinet meeting at noon to-morrow. In exchange for this ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux

... half an hour I began to feel confoundedly uncomfortable. I was a mere cipher in the room; and what with the appalling bulk of Mr. Tims, the attention the ladies bestowed upon him, and the neglect with which they treated me, I sunk considerably in my own estimation. In proportion as this feeling took possession ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various

... sense of honor to politics, that both of them, being professional soldiers and consequently without freedom of choice, need not take the same point of view as a responsible Foreign Minister. During our conversation I was informed that a telegram from Ems, in cipher, if I recollect rightly, of about 200 "groups," was being deciphered. When the copy was handed to me it showed that Abeken had drawn up and signed the telegram at his Majesty's command, and I read it out to my guests,[36] whose dejection was so great that they turned away ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... one, which stood half built with a sloping plank-roof over it. There he lay wedged into the farthest corner, close wrapped in the happy Nirvana of self-forgetfulness—school zero, and Mrs. Holman a cipher—his body bent down over his knees, his coat pulled up about his neck to keep out the drips, and his boots ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie

... 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

... then click! click! the instrument gave the code signal that the matter was ended, and I repeated the signal, opened my code-book, and began to translate the instructions into cipher for safety's sake. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... him as most characteristically American. He replied, "The headlines in your daily press." Just what M. Dubost did think of our achievements in that department of journalism may be gathered from a letter he addressed the very same day to his friend, Marcel Complans, director of the Bureau of Cipher Codes in the Ministry of ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky

... as will enable me to find out what sort of an accident it was and to whom it happened. I had rather all his friends should die than that I should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out the meaning of another such ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various

... the son of David, as is due unto him," the Arabic words being "Amilu tarik la Saidna ben Daud." He is mounted on a horse, and is attired in robes of silk and embroidery with a large turban on his head, and from the turban is suspended a long white cloth adorned with a chain upon which the cipher of Mohammed is engraved. Then he appears before the Caliph and kisses his hand, and the Caliph rises and places him on a throne which Mohammed had ordered to be made for him, and all the Mohammedan princes who attend the court of the Caliph ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela

... 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 ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... Sir Francis Inglefield, were carried by Gifford to Secretary Walsingham; were deciphered by the art of Philips, his clerk; and copies taken of them. Walsingham employed another artifice, in order to obtain full insight into the plot: he subjoined to a letter of Mary's a postscript in the same cipher; in which he made her desire Babington to inform her of the names of the conspirators. The indiscretion of Babington furnished Walsingham with still another means of detection, as well as of defence. That gentlemen had caused a picture to be drawn, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... I can read and write and cipher up to fractions. That's all I want. You fellows go and I'll stay home. You needn't be scared I'll steal ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... confidants—my agents and instruments. Such I have already engaged in some forty cities. I furnish them instructions, telling them what to do, in order to participate in the liberation of Germany; they have to send me weekly reports, written of course in cipher and with chemical ink, and, on my part, I address reports to the Emperor Alexander and Baron von Stein, which I forward every week by special couriers to Russia. My agents, as well as myself, will endeavor to hold ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach

... refusal of Richard and Susan Talbot to allow their Cicely to assume the part of Queen Elizabeth. They had been dismayed at her doing so in child's play, and since she could read fluently, write pretty well, and cipher a little, the good mother had decided to put a stop to this free association with the boys at the castle, and to keep her at home to study needlework and housewifery. As to her acting with boys before the assembled households, the proposal seemed to them absolutely insulting ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 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 in its ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... 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 kindly received, and wisely advised, on reaching ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... Austro-Hungarian Legation, which still lingered in that city. The first and last parts of the message were in plain language, good English, quite innocent and proper. But the kernel of the despatch was written in the numerical secret cipher of Vienna, which of course I was unable to read. I drew attention to this, and asked mildly how I could be expected to put this passage into our code without knowing what the words were. The answer was that it would not be necessary to code this passage; it could ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke

... the gendarmerie. Thither was our unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth the contents of his pockets. A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a pipe and tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change: that was all. Not a file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to identify or to condemn. The very gendarme was appalled before ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... son. Thus the title of scribe was of no value in itself, and did not designate, as one might naturally think, a savant educated in a school of high culture, or a man of the world, versed in the sciences and the literature of his time; El-kab was a scribe who knew how to read, write, and cipher, was fairly proficient in wording the administrative formulas, and could easily apply the elementary rules of book-keeping. There was no public school in which the scribe could be prepared for his future career; but as soon as a child had acquired the first rudiments of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... after we'd had a little more talk, 's'posen you come 'round to my place to-morro' 'bout 'leven o'clock, an' mebbe we c'n cipher this thing out. I don't say positive that we kin,' I says, 'but mebbe, mebbe.' So that afternoon I sent over to the county seat an' got a description an' had a second morgidge drawed up fer two hundred dollars, an' Mis' Cullom signed it ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott

... magnificence in Thee is lost:— What are ten thousand worlds compared to Thee? And what am I then?—Heaven's unnumbered host, Though multiplied by myriads, and arrayed In all the glory of sublimest thought, Is but an atom in the balance, weighed Against Thy greatness—is a cipher brought Against infinity! What ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various

... typed pages which she read could be always construed in two or three senses. But only her father knew the actual meaning which the writer intended to convey. For hours she would often be engaged in reading them. Sometimes, too, telegrams in cipher arrived, and she would then obtain the little, dark-blue covered book from the safe, and by its aid decipher the messages from the ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux

... or 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 surveillance ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... 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, ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan

... up the air-gun, and gazed upon it as if it had been a telegram in cipher from a detective. Then he tried to conceal it under his coat, but it ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton

... Montreuil au Ministre, 12 Juin, 1756. The original is in cipher.] "M. de Vaudreuil overwhelms me with civilities," Montcalm writes to the Minister of War. "I think that he is pleased with my conduct towards him, and that it persuades him there are general officers in France who can act ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... retrogression probable; he understood that, if reforms were more difficult to obtain in Piedmont than elsewhere, they would be more durable when obtained. At last a concession of real value was wrung from the king: the censure was revoked. Cavour saw that the press, which till then had been a cipher, would instantly become of vast importance. He left his retirement to found a newspaper, to which he gave the name by which the Italian movement will be known in history—Il Risorgimento. He was not a born journalist, ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... him at his capital. Once at Cairo, the Khedive kept him there as a prisoner. Zebehr's son, Suleiman, was at the head of his army of some 3000 fighting men, as plucky as Gordon's men were cowardly. When the father was detained at Cairo, he telegraphed in cipher to his son to break into open revolt, and even to attack the Government. Gordon knew that his men were utterly unable to meet Suleiman's troops in the field, so he tried another method to intimidate the rebels. ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill

... William Wright until April, 1829. During this short time he learned to read, write, and cipher as far as the single rule of three, as it was then called, or simple proportion. During his residence with William Wright, nothing could exceed his kindness or gratitude to the whole family. He learned to graft trees, and thus rendered great assistance to William Wright ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... restrained himself reluctantly at the thought of the inevitable ruin which would ensue. He had been an inmate of the house long enough to know, with a completeness which would have embarrassed that gentleman, what a cipher Mr. Pett was in the home and how little his championship would avail in the event of a clash with Mrs. Pett. And to give Ogden that physical treatment which should long since have formed the main ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course, when I came of age, I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under the ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln

... (xvii. 9) there was extant a collection of Caesar's letters to C. Oppius and Cornelius Balbus, written in a kind of cipher. (See Suetonius, Caesar, 56.) Two letters of Caesar to Oppius and Balbus are extant in the collection of Cicero's letters (Ad Atticum, ix. 8, 16), both expressed with admirable brevity and clearness. One of them also shows his good sense ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... Interior, and the third to the Minister of Finance, giving detailed statistics concerning the age, occupation, and progress of her proteges. "How many know how to read? How many to read and write? How many to read, write, and cipher? What progress has been made since the last report?" These are some of the questions she has to answer; and, meanwhile, if a crowd of little children come in, she turns from her writing and calculations and plays with them as if she had ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft

... myself,) that I acknowledge no such tiger for a friend of mine. Nevermore was the bridge across the Irwell a bridge of sighs for me. And the meanest of the factory population—thanks be to their discrimination—despised my pretensions too entirely to waste a thought or a menace upon a cipher so abject. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... a copious collection of life-like and trustworthy views of the past. The secrets of diplomacy have been revealed. The official statements drawn up for the public may now be tested by the more truthful and unguarded accounts conveyed in cipher to all the foreign courts of Europe. Of not less importance, perhaps, than the official publications are the fruits of private research, among which are several valuable collections of original documents. While the author has not failed to enrich his pages with ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... a desperate good schollard about us, 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, Mr Boots, I tell you ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... our dispatch and cipher book, and he will attend to it better than you or I, for he is an ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour

... the fault, and not the actor of it? Why, every fault's condemned ere it be done. Mine were the very cipher of a function, To fine the faults whose fine stands in record, And let go by the actor. Measure for Measure, Act ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... said Pete. "Good irrigated land is better than any man's name on a note; and I don't care who that man is. A man might die or run away, or play the market. Land stays put. Well, after my first glimpse of the cold shoulder I ciphered round a spell. I'm a great hand to cipher round. Some one is out to down me; some one is givin' out orders. Who? Mayer Zurich, I judged. He sold me a shoddy coat once. And he wept because he couldn't loan me the money I wanted, himself. He's one of these liers-in-wait you ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... near it he built a log high-school, which soon became Washington College, the first institution of the kind west of the Alleghanies. Other churches, and many other schools, were soon built. Any young man or woman who could read, write, and cipher felt competent to teach an ordinary school; higher education, as elsewhere at this time in the west, was in the hands of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt

... Diary, III. 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

... named Westerfeltner, a man who held a place of trust and confidence, was the man who stole it. For it he was offered a sum of money which would make him independent for life, and under the temptation he weakened and he stole it. But first he stole the key to the cipher, which would make it possible for anyone having both the key and the message to decode the message. Once this is done the damage is done, for the signature is ample proof of the validity of the document. That is ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... side-shakings in the kitchen,—entitles him 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, at 85, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... same evening 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

... minister, while they disgusted the aristocracy, gave great umbrage to the dean of Louvain, who saw himself reduced to a mere cipher in the administration. In consequence of his representations a second, and afterwards a third minister was sent to Castile, with authority to divide the government with the cardinal. But all this was of little avail. On one occasion, the co-regents ventured to rebuke their haughty ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott

... whose limbs are like gold (in hue); He that is possessed of beautiful limbs; He whose person is decked with Angadas made with sandal-paste; He that is the slayer of heroes; He that has no equal; He that is like cipher (in consequence of no attributes being affirmable of Him); He that stands in need of no blessings (in consequence of His fulness); He that never swerves from His own nature and puissance and knowledge; He ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... a woman of some education, his mother had taught him to read and write and cipher—not that he was a great adept at any of those arts, but he possessed the groundwork, which was an important matter; and he did his best to keep up his knowledge by reading sign-boards, looking into book-sellers' windows, ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston

... on their way back, a somewhat longer telegraphic message than Allan's was flashing its way past them along the wires, in the reverse direction—from Thorpe Ambrose to London. The message was in cipher, and, the signs being interpreted, it ran thus: "From Lydia Gwilt to Maria Oldershaw.—Good news! He is coming back. I mean to have an interview with him. Everything looks well. Now I have left the cottage, I have no women's prying eyes to dread, and I can come and go as ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... Marble visited Florida. On November 22, under the sobriquet "Moses," he telegraphed in cipher to William T. Pelton, Tilden's nephew, then domiciled in Tilden's home at 15 Gramercy Park: "Have just received proposition to hand over a Tilden decision of Board and certificate of Governor for $200,000." Pelton thought it too much, and Marble again telegraphed that ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... is nonsense; the cosmopolite is a cipher, worse than a cipher; outside of nationality there is neither art, nor truth, nor life; ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... French had been driven out of Russia, and that various prophets had since declared that Napoleon was Antichrist, and would one day escape from his island prison to exercise universal sway on earth. Nay, some good folk had even declared the letters of Napoleon's name to constitute the Apocalyptic cipher! ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... for such treason, and turn the price of public honor to fairy-money, whose withered leaves but mock the possessor with the futile memory of self-degradation. Let every man remember, that, though he may be a nothing in himself, yet every cipher gains the power of multiplying by ten when it is placed on the right side of whatever unit for the time represents the cause of truth and justice. What we need is a thorough awakening of the individual conscience; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... if that was what made Susan so gracious about my leaving home? But I don't believe she did—I mean that Susan suspected that George and Rhoda had any particular reason for inviting me. I wonder if I shall ever make Susan see that I am not a cipher? Of course if George and Rhoda really have any particular reason, and Susan comes to know it, that will show her that other people do not consider me a cipher. I wonder what most people would think of Mr. Iglesias? Of course he has only been ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... and again she had been perplexed and mystified by certain incomprehensible things which she had observed—for instance, the fact that, as she knew, part of Max's correspondence was conducted in cipher; that at times he seemed quite unaccountably worried and depressed; and, above all, that he was for ever at the beck and call of Adrienne ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... line, without owning a single acre of land,—one of the poorest of the poor whites. The boy Andrew, born shortly after his father's death in 1767, was reared in poverty and almost without education, learning at school only to "read, write, and cipher;" nor did he have any marked desire for knowledge, and never could spell correctly. At the age of thirteen he was driven from his native village by its devastation at the hands of the English soldiers, during the Revolutionary War. His mother, a worthy ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord

... or 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 pleasant, and there were a thou— Good Lord! all ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... merks for an old Blue-Gown! Think on the act 1701 regulating bail-bonds!Strike off a cipher from the sumI am content to ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... carry on for herself, she may originate through Persia. And in that we see the remarkable case realized—that two ciphers may politically form an affirmative power of great strength by combining: Russia, though a giant otherwise, is a cipher as to India by situation—viz. by distance, and the deserts along the line of this distance. Persia, though not so ill situated, is a cipher by her crazy condition as to population and aggressive resources. But this will not hinder each ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... the Earl of Rutland, or another. Others give Bacon only a portion of the plays, as those containing many legal terms. The majority, however, are thoroughgoing "Baconians," and the most prodigious cases of misapplied ingenuity have been the efforts to find in the First Folio a cipher, by which certain letters are selected which proclaim Bacon's authorship; as The Great Cryptogram, 1887, by Ignatius Donnelly, and The Bi-Literal Cypher of Francis Bacon, 1900, by Mrs. Gallup. Such cyphers are mutually destructive, and their absurdity has been repeatedly ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson

... prove everything else and fervently believed that endless meanings were deducible from the numerical value of Biblical words, that not a curl at the tail of a letter of any word in any sentence but had its supersubtle significance. The elaborate cipher with which Bacon is alleged to have written Shakspeare's plays was mere child's play compared with the infinite revelations which in Karlkammer's belief the Deity left latent in writing the Old Testament ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... a man of talent and experience, who had already exercised an important influence on British policy and who was more in sympathy with the policy of the prime minister than Dudley had been, but who was not content, like Dudley, to be a mere cipher in the department over which he was called to preside. Aberdeen, though opposed to the narrow boundaries which Wellington wished to assign to liberated Greece, was no less antagonistic than his chief to any attempt to make the new Greek state politically important; and he was even of opinion that ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... who signed in cipher the secret letter to William, Prince of Orange, were Henry Sidney, brother of Algernon Sidney (S480); Edward Russell, a kinsman of Lord Russell, beheaded by Charles II (S480); the Earl of Devonshire, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... remarks a prophecy? He had hardly ceased speaking when an officer appeared with a telegram in his hand. This the major eagerly took and, noting that it was in cipher, read it by means of the code he carried in his pocket. Translated, it ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green

... very awkward," I said, despondently. "I know no more of shorthand than of Sanskrit, and though I once tried to make out a cipher, the only tangible result was a ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall



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