Coded

Part of speech: adjective, verb

Pronunciation: /ˈkəʊ.dəd/

Definitions

1. A set of instructions or symbols that conveys particular meaning through a specified system of rules
2. A sequence of symbols or instructions arranged to represent information following specific rules
3. An organized system of characters or signals used to encode and transmit data

Etymology: The idea that a secret message needs a "code" grows from a tree trunk. Latin "caudex" meant the stock or stem of a tree, and also a block of wood coated with wax for writing on. Because those wooden writing boards were bound together like pages, the word came to mean a book, and Latin later reshaped it as "cōdex". Old French took the legal sense, a body of laws, from the Latin, and English borrowed that sense from French in the Middle Ages. "Codex" survives as a doublet, a separate English word from the same root, used for an ancient manuscript book. Only later did the word narrow to its modern meaning of rules for turning ideas into symbols. The verb "to code" and the past form "coded" follow from that: something coded has been converted into a system of symbols. Those are the facts the record gives, and the link from a tree's stem to a cipher runs through law and books.

Synonyms: encrypted, encoded

Antonyms: decoded, plain