codetext

English

Etymology

From code +‎ text.

Noun

codetext (plural codetexts)

1. (cryptography) An encoded form of a message, as opposed to plaintext.

   Antonym: plaintext

   • 1974, The Family Creative Workshop, Plenary Publications International:

     To work well, a code must have thousands of plaintext words or phrases with a codetext equivalent for each. Usually, for the sake of manageability, a codetext word is limited to three to five letters or numbers. All the codetexts and their plaintext meanings are listed in a codebook.

   • 2004, David Kahn, “Yardley’s Triumph”, in The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking, New Haven, Conn., London: Yale University Press, page 67:

     The repetitions of the codetext matched those of the proposed plaintext perfectly. […] The two spent the morning inserting his equivalents into the codetexts, but none stood close enough together in the texts to obtain confirmation through new identifications.

   • 2018, Jamie A. Davies, “Synthetic biology for engineering”, in Synthetic Biology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, page 82:

     DNA encryption of images, part 1: Alice uses her library of primers to make codetext^c-plaintext^c pairs. […] The result of adding the whole library to the long DNA, letting the copying happen, and then dissociating the copied DNA from the original is that Alice will have a collection of plaintext^c-codetext^c pairs, the codetext^c being photosensitive (the superscript c indicates a strand complementary, so able to bind to the original DNA). Alice then adds her mixture of plaintext^c-codetext^c pairs to her chip, and the strands will hybridize to the complementary, immobile strands on the chip.

See also

• ciphertext