Decipher
noun, verb ·3 syllables ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A decipherment; a decoding.
"I enclose a letter which I received yesterday evening from the Marques de Monsalud, containing the decipher of a letter from the King to the Comte d'Erlon. I wish that the Marques had sent the ciphered letter here […]"
- 1 To convert a code or cipher to plain text. transitive
- 2 read with difficulty wordnet
- 3 To read text that is almost illegible or obscure. transitive
- 4 convert code into ordinary language wordnet
- 5 To make sense of a complex situation. transitive
"Truly, we need human infirmity to teach us human nature, and that to Louis had been as a sealed book; he had only seen the coloured and gilded outside: too late he had to decipher the rough and gloomy page within."
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- 6 To find a solution to a problem. transitive
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"It took me several hours to decipher it."
Etymology
As decypher, but not retaining the y from the Old French etyma of cipher (cyfre, cyffre); the i spelling tends to be preferred etymologically, being consistent with its cognates, the French déchiffrer and the Italian decifrare, and with their common ancestor, the Medieval Latin cifra, cifera, ciphra. By surface analysis, de- + cipher.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.