How to Use cipher in a Sentence

cipher

noun

• She was nothing more than a cipher.
• There were no limits on who could step into the cipher.
  — Ime Ekpo, Forbes.com, 12 Aug. 2025
• But for many artists, the queen was more cipher than an enemy.
  — Los Angeles Times, 12 Sep. 2022
• On the page, its words can seem as blunt and cipher-like as notes on a musical staff.
  — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 26 Apr. 2018
• Most frustrating of all is the show’s saintly cipher of a hero.
  — Judy Berman, Time, 4 June 2021
• And there was this woman at its center who was always a bit of a cipher, hard to pin down.
  — Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times, 11 Sep. 2023
• Mike serves as a kind of cipher for this coming-of-age realization in the show.
  — Leah Beckmann, The Cut, 21 June 2018
• The landlady remains a cipher, and yet a faint aspect of loss haloes her.
  — Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 21 Aug. 2019
• For one thing, the pair told her, the final passage uses a layered cipher.
  — Theresa MacHemer, Smithsonian Magazine, 31 Jan. 2020
• The show shifts from standing circle to ascending rows of chairs, then back to the cipher.
  — Dasun Imanuel, Essence, 28 Aug. 2019
• Laurel remains a cipher, a comic type, a star without a name.
  — Jason Zinoman, New York Times, 1 June 2018
• And Elvis himself remains a cipher, a symbol, more myth than flesh and blood.
  — New York Times, 23 June 2022
• Ford’s son Jack received gold cufflinks showing the crown along with her cipher.
  — Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY, 18 Sep. 2022
• Some of the plans these cipher administrators came up with are the stuff of nightmares.
  — Ed Burmila, The New Republic, 13 June 2019
• Don't ask me, but some online sleuths have already managed to figure out the cipher in the image.
  — Evan Romano, Men's Health, 7 Mar. 2022
• Back at the Anomaly Stone, Gabriel and his cipher crew are working.
  — Dalene Rovenstine, EW.com, 2 July 2020
• But while Josh and Saul are singing ciphers, Owen and Manus are complex and whole.
  — Sara Holdren, Vulture, 8 Nov. 2023
• For instance, a team might embed a cipher in the pixels of its scoreboard to tell a batter what pitch to expect.
  — Popular Science, 28 Jan. 2020
• Block ciphers go back to the 1850s and are the core of most modern encryption schemes.
  — George Musser, Quanta Magazine, 6 June 2023
• And the show has been (lightly) criticized for turning Budd in to something of a cipher.
  — Chloe Schama, Vogue, 24 Oct. 2018
• How does someone create the most iconic rap album cover of the past decade and yet remain a complete cipher?
  — Hazlitt, 6 July 2022
• Just over a decade later, Saif al-Islam is now something of a cipher for Libyans.
  — Reuters, CNN, 14 Nov. 2021
• The Blind Owl is extremely dense, brimming with metaphors and ciphers and symbols.
  — Amir Ahmadi Arian, The Dial, 15 Jan. 2026
• Curry has always remained a bit of a cipher — a soft-spoken assassin, of sorts — and this doc doesn’t do a whole lot to change that.
  — Marlow Stern, Rolling Stone, 24 Jan. 2023
• Each mailbox on the country’s roadsides features the insignia or cipher of the monarch reigning at the time it was erected.
  — Jennifer Hassan, Washington Post, 9 Sep. 2022
• The text was written in either a code that has not yet been cracked or a natural language and cipher that haven't yet been identified.
  — Justin E.h. Smith, WSJ, 25 Sep. 2021
• The venue that was completed in late 2019 is a cipher to Ganong and the rest of the Olympians.
  — Nathan Fenno, Los Angeles Times, 4 Feb. 2022
• Now and then someone at the edge of the cipher would cut in, and there would be a trio for a minute, weaving like birds finding the right formation to slice the sky.
  — New York Times, 15 Sep. 2021
• McGarrett took a picture of the cipher before handing it over – but that proves to be a literal dead end.
  — Bill Keveney, USA TODAY, 4 Apr. 2020
• Finally, Marilyn is not presented as a cipher to be solved or quarry to be caged.
  — Los Angeles Times, 20 Jan. 2026