Definition of CRYPTOGRAPHY

Did You Know?

For a word having to do with secrets, "cryptography" has a surprisingly transparent etymology. The word traces back to the Greek roots kryptos, meaning "hidden," and graphein, meaning "to write." "Kryptos" - which in turn traces to the Greek verb kryptein, meaning "to hide" - is a root shared by several English words, including "crypt," "cryptic," and "encrypt." "Krypton," the name of a colorless gaseous element used especially in some fluorescent lamps and photography flashes, also comes from "kryptos." The name was chosen because the gas is rare and hard to find.

Examples of cryptography in a Sentence

Companies often use cryptography to protect private information.

Recent Examples on the Web

Even if the cryptography itself is perfectly secure and anonymous, the problem is that the system is only as secure as each voter's cryptographic credentials. — Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica, "Experts criticize West Virginia’s plan for smartphone voting," 7 Aug. 2018 Intel says Sunny Cove also increases performance in specialized tasks by adding new instructions that will improve the speed of cryptography and AI and machine learning. — Gordon Mah Ung, PCWorld, "Surprise! Intel reveals 10nm Sunny Cove CPU cores that go deeper, wider, and faster," 12 Dec. 2018 As skeptics in the cryptography community have repeatedly pointed out, the true Satoshi ought to have access to the cryptographic keys that control the first bitcoins—coins that have stayed put for a decade. — Garrett M. Graff, WIRED, "Did Satoshi Nakamoto Write This Book Excerpt? A Wired Investigation," 1 July 2018 For example, the AES cryptography performance is far higher on the XPS 13 than the MacBook Air. — Gordon Mah Ung, PCWorld, "Here's how much slower (and faster?) Apple's new MacBook Air is than Dell's XPS 13," 2 Nov. 2018 Uber’s differential privacy software doesn’t use a blockchain, a kind of digital records system guarded by cryptography that can limit and log who makes changes or additions. — Tom Simonite, WIRED, "How a Startup Is Using the Blockchain to Protect Your Privacy," 11 July 2018 Matt Green, a cryptography expert and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. — Derek Hawkins, Washington Post, "The Cybersecurity 202: Security community has its own encryption debate after discovery of new flaw," 15 May 2018 First, here are the main objections to Clear, as outlined in a blog post published Thursday by Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins professor specializing in cryptography and security. — Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, "Ray Ozzie’s plan for unlocking encrypted phones gets a chilly reception," 26 Apr. 2018 The response by the developers of cryptography software is to implement their algorithms in such a way as to defend against these data leaks. — Peter Bright, Ars Technica, "Hyperthreading under scrutiny with new TLBleed crypto key leak," 25 June 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'cryptography.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

History and Etymology for cryptography

borrowed from New Latin cryptographia, from crypto- crypto- + -graphia -graphy

Note: New Latin cryptographia was perhaps first used by the Limburg-born philologist Erycius Puteanus (Eric de Put, Eric van den Putte, 1574-1646) in "Cryptographia epistolica, sive de clandestina scriptione," an addendum to his Epistolarum reliquiae centuria V (Leuven/Louvain, 1612). An apparently more widely circulated work using the word was Cryptomenytices et cryptographiae libri IX (Lüneburg, 1624) by Gustavus Selenus, pseudonym of Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1579-1666).

Learn More about cryptography