Transcode

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The transformation of a digital format to another is necessary for device compatibility across varying platforms and technologies while ensuring the essential details are unchanged
2. To change digital content from one encoding system to another without significant loss of information
3. The process by which digital files are altered into different formats to enable playback or use on diverse devices

Etymology: "Transcode" is a plain compound: the Latin prefix "trans-", meaning "across" or "over", attached to "code". The "code" half has a longer road behind it. It comes from Latin "caudex", meaning a trunk or block of wood, which later came to mean a book, and passed into Latin as "codex" for a bound book. Old French then borrowed it as "code", a systematic collection of laws, and English took the word in Middle English, first in the legal sense of a body of laws. The sense of "code" that matters here, a system of symbols for representing information, is a far later development, and it is what gives "transcode" its meaning: to move content from one such system into another. The prefix does the work of "across", so the word describes carrying something over a border between encodings. Its formation is transparent, and it is a modern technical coinage built from older parts rather than an old word with a surprising past.

Synonyms: convert, translate, transform, encode, decipher