Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Cipher   Listen
noun
Cipher  n.  
1.
(Arith.) A character (0) which, standing by itself, expresses nothing, but when placed at the right hand of a whole number, increases its value tenfold.
2.
One who, or that which, has no weight or influence. "Here he was a mere cipher."
3.
A character in general, as a figure or letter. (Obs.) "This wisdom began to be written in ciphers and characters and letters bearing the forms of creatures."
4.
A combination or interweaving of letters, as the initials of a name; a device; a monogram; as, a painter's cipher, an engraver's cipher, etc. The cut represents the initials N. W.
5.
A private alphabet, system of characters, or other mode of writing, contrived for the safe transmission of secrets; also, a writing in such characters. "His father... engaged him when he was very young to write all his letters to England in cipher."
Cipher key, a key to assist in reading writings in cipher.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Cipher" Quotes from Famous Books



... a woman of some education, his mother had taught him to read and write and cipher—not that he was a great adept at any of those arts, but he possessed the groundwork, which was an important matter; and he did his best to keep up his knowledge by reading sign-boards, looking into book-sellers' windows, and studying any ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston

... Democrates was not drinking wine at his betrothal feast, but sending this cipher letter by a swift ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... Illinois, a leading member of Congress a half-century ago, during a recent address to the old settlers of McLean County related an incident of early days on the Wabash. Population was sparse, and the common school was yet far in the future. The teacher who could read, write, and "cipher" to the "single rule of three" was well equipped for his noble calling. Lamentable failures upon the part of aspirants to attain even the modest standard indicated, were by ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... service here. He isn't giving away official business any, but he isn't in sympathy with Hall or Wilson. One of them sent a wire to Riverton an hour since. It was to some one the operator never heard of before, evidently a friend of theirs. It mentioned 999, your name, and Fogg. The rest of it was in cipher." ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman

... influence over so firm and energetic a character as Lord George Murray, while it would be easy for him to sway the young Duke of Perth, and he was not long in poisoning the ear of the latter against his companion in arms by representing to him that Lord George treated him as a mere cipher, although of equal rank in the army. The secretary's purpose was even more easily carried out with Prince Charles. The latter was no judge of character, and fell readily under the influence of the wily and unscrupulous Murray, who flattered his weaknesses and assumed an air ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty

... the Chief Clerk of the Department. Her duties in the office of the Chief Clerk required her to be familiar with the work of the bureaus of the Department and the many intricate questions constantly presented to the Chief Clerk's office. She was required to have expert knowledge of the cipher used in the Department, and a considerable part of her time was employed in enciphering and deciphering telegrams sent from and ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... average Russian officer. General Antonovsky, of the old Russian Military Academy, who also assisted in the drafting of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans, was a participant in the scheme, and was within an ace of becoming the admiral's Chief of Staff. Everything was working splendidly, when the cipher message from Renoff opened the ball. Beloff was sent to the east, and Antonovsky to the south, and the Absolutists ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... gave a sudden chuckle of comprehension. "And not a very obscure cipher, Watson," said he. "Why, of course, it is Italian! The A means that it is addressed to a woman. 'Beware! Beware! Beware!' How's ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle

... exclusively than he was aware, through the medium of sense. From Flavian in that brief early summer of his existence, he had derived a powerful impression of the [234] "perpetual flux": he had caught there, as in cipher or symbol, or low whispers more effective than any definite language, his own Cyrenaic philosophy, presented thus, for the first time, in an image or person, with much attractiveness, touched also, consequently, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... recite poetry, to draw maps and to make use of arithmetic, but his lessons in arithmetic had to be discontinued because an ignorant guard noticed the multiplication tables that the Prince was learning and reported that he was being taught to speak and write in cipher. One of the king's men was removed from the Temple because it was said that he had used hieroglyphics in order to make secret correspondence between the king and queen easier, and even his explanation that the figures he had made use of were only arithmetic tables which he laid by the Dauphin's ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... test the play of "Julius Caesar" has a glowing future ahead of it. It was written by Gentlemen Shakespeare, Bacon and Donnelly, who collaborated together on it. Shakespeare did the lines and plot, Bacon furnished the cipher and Donnelly called attention to it through ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... of real development; but the fact remains that the American mother is a tedious person. The American father is better, for he is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher. The mother, however, is always with us, and, lacking the quick imitative faculty of the younger generation, remains uninteresting and provincial to the last. In spite of her, however, the American girl is always welcome. She brightens our dull dinner parties for us and makes life go ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course, when I came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education I have picked up from time to time under ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... it must be allowed there is no cipher, because they have two figures to support them; but take these two figures away, and the whole wit of mankind may be defied to patch up or recruit the number without having recourse to the race ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... was his superior in the Priesthood, if not in experience and ability, looked upon me as a cipher, fit for nothing. The rough treatment and slights that I received from him were more than humiliating to a man of fine feelings and a spirit such as I possessed. I said nothing to him, but I poured out my soul ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee

... absence of any machinery for multiplying copies of documents, an inconvenience which, in the case of the acta diurna, as well as of important letters, must have been keenly felt? Even shorthand and cipher, though known, were rarely practised. Caesar, [81] however, used them; but in many points he was beyond his age. In America, where labour is refractory, mechanical substitutes for it are daily being invented. A calculating machine, and ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... the object of endeavoring to disprove and discredit these stories that the emperor caused a telegram, to be sent to the czar from Hubertusstock, not written, as usual, in cipher, but in ordinary language. There is an old French proverb according to which "he who seeks to prove too much, proves nothing," and thus it happened that this open telegram which reached the czar at Chalons, and which was published ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... of the French king's new plan to buy Dunkirk at his own price came in a letter from Hamilton, which reached me at Lilly's house two or three weeks after my return from Dover. Like the others, it was written in cipher, but, translated, ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major

... would Banks land the scheme? I know him. You put him on that German cipher-code job down Honolulu way, an' it cost you about a thousand before you could pull out. We'll give you seven ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... a thing," Southwick said. "We got instructions to pack up a pretty strange assortment of supplies for the Scorpius and that's all I know. The order was in special cipher, though, so we're all ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage

... been in search for the cipher-books they would only have looked for them alone," I remarked decisively. "What on earth could interest them in all these dry, unimportant shipping ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux

... principle had these letters been arranged? He who held the paper was alone able to tell. With such cipher language it is as with the locks of some of our iron safes—in either case the protection is the same. The combinations which they lead to can be counted by millions, and no calculator's life would suffice to express them. Some particular "word" has to be known before the lock of the ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne

... Capitol; Lovaine, Morier, Haddington, Hamilton, Kestner, Falck, G. Fitzclarence, Sir W. Gell, a little Italian servant, and Mr. Hall, Bunsen's brother-in-law. Haddington told the story of Canning's sending to Bagot a despatch in cipher, containing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... Penfield kept his eyes and ears open, and before long he had another detail to report by cipher telegram to the general manager. Ford was evidently preparing for another absence, and from what the chief clerk could overhear, he was led to believe that the pseudo supervisor of track would be left in charge of Plug ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... after it has been "raised." The original cheque was for $7.50 and shows very careless arrangement. It was a very easy matter for the fraudulent receiver to change the "seven" to "seventy" and to add a cipher to the amount in figures. The running line was written in on the raised cheque to deceive the bank. In this case Mr. Carter and not the bank must suffer the loss. Mr. Carter cannot hold the bank responsible for ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various

... that of truth, not of ignorance. Her father has given her what he calls 'a good old-fashioned English education;' that means, he says, that 'she thoroughly knows how to read, write, and cipher, which few girls brought up at French boarding-schools do.' As might be suspected from the practical ideas in her narrative, our young friend has had that complete development of her faculties which arises out of the necessities of country-life in its best aspects. There is hardly a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... typical story of this period deals with a cipher message for Thomas. Mr. Edison narrates it as follows: "When I was an operator in Cincinnati working the Louisville wire nights for a time, one night a man over on the Pittsburg wire yelled out: 'D. I. cipher,' which meant ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... led me the life of the damned. You know well what bitter cup you have made me drink. If I have stood to the world as my father's heir, you have eaten up the inheritance If my father's house was mine, I was no more than a cipher in it. I have had the shadow, and you the substance. You have undermined ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... she would have found added, by way of complement, "Experience is untranslatable. We write it in the cipher of our sufferings, and the key ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... letters—that interlaced, old-fashioned cipher. That Z. H. that she knew of old stood for Zachary Hepburn, Philip's father. She knew how Philip valued this watch. She remembered having seen it in his hands the very day before his disappearance, when he was looking at the time in his annoyance at Sylvia's ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell

... confusion, occasioned by the attitude I had adopted in consequence, he made this confession to me in a moment of agitation. He was, he said, overpowered by a sentiment with regard to me which amounted to this—that a man wanted, after all, to be something more than a cipher in his own house, where, if anywhere, it is not pleasant to serve as a mere foil to some one else. This sentiment was merely excusable, he thought, in a man who, though he might reasonably suppose himself of some account among his fellows, had been ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... and had bestowed them about their persons somewhat ostentatiously. Pedro had even caused Manuela to stick a brace of small pistols and a large knife in her belt; and, as Indian women are sometimes known to be capable of defending themselves as vigorously as men, she was by no means a cipher in the ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne

... and the letter from my hands, Jud holding the light and Ump turning the envelope around in his fingers, peering curiously. They might have been some guardians of a twilight country examining a mysterious passport signed right but writ in cipher, and one that from some hidden angle ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... dared word it plainly, there sure would be something queer to laugh at when John read it. But we had to cipher it, you know," ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... supplies, controlled the Indians; and when the King's reproof became too sharp, Bigot simply threatened to resign, which wrought consternation, for no man of ability would attempt to unwind the tangle of Bigot's dishonesty during a critical war. Montcalm wrote home complaints in cipher. The French government bided its time, and Bigot tightened his vampire suckers on the lifeblood of the dying nation. The whole era is a theme for the allegory ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... Legation, which still lingered in that city. The first and last parts of the message were in plain language, good English, quite innocent and proper. But the kernel of the despatch was written in the numerical secret cipher of Vienna, which of course I was unable to read. I drew attention to this, and asked mildly how I could be expected to put this passage into our code without knowing what the words were. The answer was that it would not be necessary to code this passage; it could be transmitted ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke

... then told what a precious purveyor of information he had found in General von der Marwitz, cavalry commander of the German first army, who made intemperate use of the wireless telegraph and did not even take the trouble to put into cipher his dispatches, of which the Eiffel Tower made a careful collection. "In the evening of September 9th," he said, "an officer of the intelligence corps brought me a dispatch from this same Marwitz couched in something like these terms: 'Tell me exactly where you are and what ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... remains of the plank bridge with some difficulty, he stood before the hideous wreck of his friend's late home, where he had spent so many glad hours listening to marvellous adventures from Paul Bevan, or learning how to read and cipher, as well as drinking in wisdom generally, from the Rose ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne

... follows that the more civilised a country becomes, the more important is the part that the elementary school plays in the life of the nation,—and that not merely because the ability to read, write, and cipher is, in the conditions which modern civilisation imposes, almost as much a "necessary of life" as the ability to walk or talk, but also and more especially because it devolves upon the school to do for the citizen in his childhood what life will not do for him in his manhood, or will do for ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... of accomplishments. "I can write, sir, and cipher. And I've learned geography and history, and Master Swift gave I lessons in mechanics, and I be very fond of poetry and ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... our locomotives. The telegraph is finished to Mining's Station, and the field-wire has just reached my bivouac, and will be ready to convey this message as soon as it is written and translated into cipher. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... it was like a key to a cipher. Instantly there flashed over my mind all that I had heard or read of that strange ritual which seduced Israel to sin. I saw a sunburnt land and a people vowed to the stern service of Jehovah. But I saw, too, eyes turning from the austere sacrifice to lonely hill-top ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... cipher," she continued, "but it is his handwriting. It is unmistakable. It was given to me when I was at church. I was kneeling in the chapel of St. Agnes, which is in the darkest corner of the building. At first I was alone, and then a woman came and knelt close beside me. ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis

... Edward Bowen was born in New Orleans. His father, Edward Bowen, went to New Orleans from Washington, D. C. He was a free man, a boss carpenter and builder by trade, and able to read, write and cipher. He was highly esteemed, was prosperous in business, accumulated some money and lived in comfort. Dr. Bowen's mother, Rose Bowen, he says, was the grand-daughter of an African Princess of the Jolloffer tribe, on the west coast ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... slightest suspicion that the assertion proved nothing but extreme self-satisfaction. Accordingly, as she could not afford to send her daughters to school as well as the boys, she decided to educate them herself. Everybody who could read, write, and cipher was supposed to be able to teach in those days, and Mrs. Caldwell undertook the task without a doubt of her own capacity. But Aunt ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... the one who had charge; no one was hindering her. Have the marriage as soon as possible? He was a mere cipher, and there was no reason for asking his advice. But steady, shucks! He had to work; he had to go out. And when he saw Josephina leaving the studio to weep somewhere else, he gave a snort of satisfaction, glad ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... topics strictly mathematical. The number for February introduces a problem by a quotation from Longfellow's "Hiawatha"; another gives a list of fifty-five of the Asteroid group, with their orbits, and the circumstances of their discovery. The March number explains an ingenious holocryptic cipher, written with the English alphabet, with no more letters than would be required for ordinary writing, yet so curiously complicated, that, while with the key easy to understand, it is without the key absolutely undecipherible, even to the inventor of the plan; and the key is capable of so many variations, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... a huge inkstand and piles of books and papers, looked at me from out of his huge wig like an owl from out its nest, and began: "What's your name? Where do you come from? Can you read, write, and cipher?" And when I assented, he went on, "Well, her Grace, in consideration of your good manners and extraordinary merit, appoints you to the vacant post of Receiver of Toll." I hurriedly passed in mental review the conduct and manners that had hitherto distinguished me, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... the following cablegram which came into my hands, Napoleon's instructions for the French evacuation were in Mexico at the very time of this pathetic scene between him and Carlotta. The despatch was in cipher when I received it, but was translated by the telegraph operator at my headquarters, who long before had mastered the ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan

... with the legation of the United States in Madrid was conducted in cipher and by cable, and needs the verification of the actual text of the correspondence. It has seemed to me to be due to the importance of the case not to submit this correspondence until the accurate text can be received by mail. It is expected ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman or a German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a light bursts upon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of Mrs. Gallup and the Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the matter of a capital letter. I withdraw my objections; I accept everything; ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... that you have come thus early, for I want a trusty man to go forthwith into the west country. What I wish you to do cannot be written, but you will take this ring;" and he took one from the little finger of his right hand, on the gem of which his cipher was graven, and gave it to my grandfather. "On showing it to Lord Boyd, whom you will find at the Dean Castle, near Kilmarnock, he will thereby know that you are specially trusted of me. The message whereof you are the bearer is to this effect,—That the Lords of the Congregation have, by their ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... admitting that I winced. He meant no harm, I suppose, but I'm bound to say that this tactless speech nettled me not a little. People are always nettling me like that. Giving me to understand, I mean to say, that in their opinion Bertram Wooster is a mere cipher and that the only member of the household with brains and ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... catch our first glimpse of the boy when he sat in a little log school-house, without windows or floor, one of a humming score of shoeless boys, where a good-natured, irritable, drinking English schoolmaster taught him to read, write, and cipher as far as Practice. This was the only school he ever attended, and that was all he learned at it. His widowed mother, with her seven young children, her little farm, and two or three slaves, could do no more for him. Next, we see him a tall, awkward, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... wireless was concealed and to escape into his own bedroom. The arrangement was ideal. And already information picked up in the halls below by Marie had been conveyed to Anfossi to relay in a French cipher to the German General ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis

... difficulties with Valori, too; "What interloping fellow is this?" gloomed Valori, "A devoted secretary of your Excellency's; on his honor, nothing more!" answered Voltaire, bowing to the ground:—and strives to behave as such; giving Valori "these poor Reports of mine to put in cipher," and the like. Very slippery ice hereabouts for the adroit man! His reports to Amelot are of sanguine tone; but indicate, to the by-stander, small progress; ice slippery, and a twinkle of the comic. Many of them are lost (or lie ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... young Mr. Cipher walked into the dentist's office instead of the doctor's. "Doctor," he groaned, "I'm in bad shape. My head aches all the time, and I can't do anything with it." "Yes, yes," said Doctor Toothaker, cheerfully. "I see; big cavity in it; must be hollow; you'll ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various

... one of Mr. Bloke's friends, he will append such explanatory notes to his account of it as will enable me to find out what sort of an accident it was and to whom it happened. I had rather all his friends should die than that I should be driven to the verge of lunacy again in trying to cipher out the meaning of another ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various

... supply the Spaniards with provisions. Lavezaris asks that more married men be sent to the islands. Some remarkably fine pearls have been obtained near Bantayan. He asks the viceroy to provide him with a cipher ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 - Volume III, 1569-1576 • E.H. Blair

... telegram from Washington. Great excitement at the embassy. Cipher telegram has been despatched to the Titan Iron Works. One of my men in Washington reports a queer experience. He had been following one of the members of the embassy staff, who saw he was being shadowed, turned suddenly on the man, and ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... taught to read. Frederick Douglass found a teacher in his mistress, where he was held as a domestic slave, and Douglass in turn taught his fellow slaves on the plantation by stealth. The advertisements of slaves that mention the slave's ability to read and cipher, as a reason for special value, prove that the more intelligent slaves had at least the rudiments of knowledge. Olmstead, in his "Cotton Kingdom," says he visited a plantation in Mississippi, where one of the negroes had, ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... crush the opposition of Amsterdam by force. He possessed however, which William II had not, the support of a majority in the Estates of Holland. He used this with effect. The raising of the troops was sanctioned by the Estates (January 31, 1684), an intercepted cipher-letter from D'Avaux being skilfully used to discredit the Amsterdam leaders, who were accused of traitorous correspondence with a foreign power. Nevertheless the prince, although he was able to override any active opposition at home, did not venture, so long as ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... mark you, is the noblest of all professions. It contains many learned and able men who devote their lives unselfishly to the amelioration of human misery; but I much doubt whether one-half the M. D.'s now sending people to the drug stores with cipher dispatches, could tell what was the matter with a suffering mortal were he transparent as glass and lit up by electricity. There are doctors doping people with powerful drugs, who couldn't tell whether a patient ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... or six visiting-cards and a solitary letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle, as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, bearing the D—— cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D——" the Minister, himself. It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the uppermost divisions ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... were put on each tag in Barbara's private cipher, understood only by Aunt Miriam. The highest was the one hoped for, the next the probable one, and the lowest one was to be taken only at the ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... that you learn to cipher, and Mr. Brownwell is an excellent teacher of arithmetic. It will not take you many months to become a good penman under his tuition, and to ...
— The Printer Boy. - Or How Benjamin Franklin Made His Mark. An Example for Youth. • William M. Thayer

... delicately avoided to declare him expressly deposed. The judges drew, however, this indelicate conclusion; the conclusion they drew was founded upon the premises; it was very just and logical; for they declared that he was a mere cipher. They commended Mr. Hastings's delicacy, though they did not imitate it; but they pronounced sentence of deposition upon the said Nabob, and they declared that any letter or paper that was produced from him could not be considered as an act of government. So effectually ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... supposed to be an answer. Chicken, some queer things happen in this business. Here's that weak-eyed, hollow-chested Saunders, that seems to have just life enough to put in about ten hours a day reading 'The Duchess,' getting cipher messages like the hero of a detective story. And sending them, too, by the way. We operators are not supposed to think; but all the same—" She got her receipt-book, filled rapidly a blank line, tucked it under her arm, and went up and tapped Evadna ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... nothing as favor, but as right; she wants to be acknowledged a moral, responsible being. She is seeking not to be governed by laws in the making of which she has no voice. She is deprived of almost every right in civil society, and is a cipher in the nation, except in the right of presenting a petition. In religious society her disabilities have greatly retarded her progress. Her exclusion from the pulpit or ministry, her duties marked out ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... ever lived amongst the volatile Latins on the other side of the Pacific. Come to think of it the one man I had seen closely had been a dark type. It was just barely possible that Bryce had somehow tangled himself in something of the kind. But then that cipher business—I was fully convinced by now that it was some original kind of cryptogram—rather pointed the other way. One of the things I had noticed had been a L sign, and anything dealing with any of the Latin Republics would almost assuredly have been written with a $ sign. Ultimately ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... lecture, at a few minutes' notice. He had been along all the pavements of Grub Street, perhaps the most exciting place of breadwinning known to the civilized man. From his beginning as a sales clerk in a New York bookstore (where, so the tale goes, by misreading the price cipher he sold a $150 volume for $1.50) down to the time when he was run over by an Erie train and dictated his weekly article for the New York Times in hospital with three broken ribs, no difficulties or ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... stood before one of the long windows in the conservatory, listlessly watching the people in the square. And these poor fools envied her! To envy her, who was a prisoner, a chattel to be exchanged for war's immunity, who was a princess in name but a cipher in fact! All was wrong with the world. She had stolen out of the ball-room; the craving to be alone had been too strong. Little she cared whether they missed her or not. She left the window and sat on one of the divans, idly opening and shutting her fan. Was that some ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath

... schooling; she learned to read, but not to write or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her time. She was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong natural traits and wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she bore ten, and nursed them all—an heroic worker, a helpful neighbor, and a provident ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... the scene. In 1831, being then eighteen years of age, he came up to London from a country village in Hertfordshire to seek his fortune, not knowing one person in the metropolis. He was, as he has since said, "a mere cipher in that vast sea of human enterprise." He was a natural inventor, of studious and observant habits. As soon as he had obtained a footing in London he began to invent. He first devised a process for copying bas-reliefs on cardboard, by which he could produce embossed copies of such ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton

... a friend of mine. Nevermore was the bridge across the Irwell a bridge of sighs for me. And the meanest of the factory population—thanks be to their discrimination—despised my pretensions too entirely to waste a thought or a menace upon a cipher ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... book of the Mystic astrologer Nostradamus and sees in it the sign, or cipher, of the universe. As he gazes a wondrous vision reveals itself: the mystic lines of the cipher seem to live and move and to form one living whole; and in spirit he beholds the Powers of Nature ascending and ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... of infinitives relate to the same object, the word to should be used before the first verb and omitted before the others; as, "He taught me to read, write, and cipher." "The most accomplished way of using books at present is to serve them as some do lords— learn their titles and then brag of ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel

... effects can never be fully understood by those who have not, at one time or another, lived in the provinces. In 1789 Monsieur Grandet—still called by certain persons le Pere Grandet, though the number of such old persons has perceptibly diminished—was a master-cooper, able to read, write, and cipher. At the period when the French Republic offered for sale the church property in the arrondissement of Saumur, the cooper, then forty years of age, had just married the daughter of a rich wood-merchant. ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac

... tries to learn something, though little it be, Each day of her life,—something useful, you see: And in two or three years you will find she can spell, Read, cipher, and write, and do ...
— The Nursery, March 1878, Vol. XXIII. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various

... a Ministry, to a great extent it was the end of the system of personal government by the sovereign." "The King," wrote Selwyn, on March 27th, "will have no more personal friends, as Lord Hertford says; there will be no opposition to that in this new Government, what a cipher his Majesty will be you may guess." Selwyn had no great respect for the King, and not much liking for his minister, Lord North. "I see him in no light, but that of a Minister, and in that I see him full of defects, and of all men I ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue

... believes she is actually going home to learn how to make apple dumplings and pumpkin pies. In spite of mother, the house is bought, and now she is gone all day, deciding how it shall be furnished, always leaving Katy out of the question, as if she were a cipher, and only consulting Wilford's choice. They will be happier alone, I know. Mrs. General Reynolds says that it is the way for young people to live; that her son's wife shall never come home to her, for of course their habits could not be alike; ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... but to Hyrcanas, Antiq. B. XIV. ch. 8. sect. 5, has hardly an appearance of a contradiction; Antipater being now perhaps considered only as Hyrcanus's deputy and minister; although he afterwards made a cipher of Hyrcanus, and, under great decency of behavior to him, took the real authority ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus

... foremost and most unsuspicious looking one, which stood half built with a sloping plank-roof over it. There he lay wedged into the farthest corner, close wrapped in the happy Nirvana of self-forgetfulness—school zero, and Mrs. Holman a cipher—his body bent down over his knees, his coat pulled up about his neck to keep out the drips, and his boots down in ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie

... kept a day-school, and taught Sophy to read, write, and cipher. They lived near London, in a lane opening on a great common, with a green rail before the house, and had a good many pupils, and kept a tortoise shell cat and a canary. Not much to enlighten her ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... investigate you, and never rest until he has discovered all the hidden laws of your being. Now, Webb, I will support you while Amy kisses you, and then you may sit down and analyze your sensations, and perhaps cipher out a method by which a kiss can ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... batch of sheep were fleeced and smitten,[Smitten. Marked with the cipher of the owner in a mixture mostly of tar.] and turned on to the hillside; and Charlotte, leaning over the wall, watched them wander contentedly up the fell, with their lambs trotting beside them. Grandfather and the squire had gone into the house; Ducie was calling her ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... falling now in big, slow flakes, a great fire blazing under the chimney with its cipher and enigmatic motto, as they sat down to the leek-soup, the hard eggs, and the salad grown and gathered by their host's own hands. The long stone passages through which they passed from church, with the narrow brown doors of the monks' dormitories one after another along the white-washed ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... the fault, and not the actor of it, Why euery fault's condemnd ere it be done: Mine were the verie Cipher of a Function To fine the faults, whose fine stands in record, And ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... silently a will of her own. She loves all her children, especially Fritz, and would so love that they loved her.—For the rest, all along, Fritz and Wilhelmina are sure allies. We perceive they have fallen into a kind of cipher-speech; [Memoires de Bareith, i. 168.] they communicate with one another by telegraphic signs. One of their words, "RAGOTIN (Stumpy)," whom does the reader think it designates? Papa himself, the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle

... the torture, but no agony can make him prove false to his friends. When his captors give him a respite from the thumbscrews and the red-hot wires that are thrust under his nails, he forgets his own torment, and scratches on his plate his cipher signals to his comrades. Those men and women in that awful country are lawless and dangerous, but they are heroic, and they are ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... at all, aunty; I shan't have one more pretty thought in my head for having a gay ribbon on my hair. Use it, aunty, please, to buy me some new books, so I can enter the highest class in school when George Wild does. Mr. Grey says I can read and cipher as well as he, though I am not so old ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... in cipher which I now send to you, on the slip of paper enclosed, is an antidote to that one of the two poisons known to you and to me by the fanciful name which you suggested for ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins

... is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say; no thing is of more importance than another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge ——'s wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it; a cipher, an O! I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... distant riches! We have our own problems to solve also, and a good deal of movement and tendency emerging into sight every day in church and state, in social modes and in letters. I sometimes fancy our cipher is larger and easier to read than that ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... and then we come across interesting things, though. For instance, I discovered a most original cipher the other day." ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... thought basely of marriage, I should perhaps accept your offer. There was a time, indeed, when it would have made me proudest among women. I was the more deceived, and have to thank you for a salutary lesson. You chose to count me as a cipher in your rolls of conquest; for six months you left me to my fate; and you come here to-day—prompted, I doubt not, by an honourable impulse—to offer this tardy reparation. No; it is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Ages." He was overruled because the officials deemed the name not in accord with the contemporaneous spirit of the Exposition. They called it the "Court of Abundance." In spite of the name, however, it is not the Court of Abundance. Mullgardt's title gives a key to the cipher of the statues. Read by it, the groups on the altar of the Tower become three successive Ages ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... of a fatalist, did not interfere. On this cockleshell of a craft, among these rude spirits of alien races, he was powerless. On land a diplomat and strategist of high order, here he was a cipher. Moreover, he was beaten to his knees, and he knew it. The arrival of the warship had upset his calculations. After many months' planning of flight, he had been forced, by the events of a few hours, into an aggressive campaign. His little cohort had done wonders, it is true, but of what avail ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... it is an article, put a cipher in the place, and 'carry' the tens. If there is no figure to 'carry' ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous

... crippled French resources and diverted their attention from Prussia; even if a war did not ensue, permanent ill feeling would be created. It is not difficult to understand the motives by which Bismarck had been influenced. At the last moment the plan failed. A cipher telegram from Berlin was misinterpreted in Madrid; and in consequence the Cortes, instead of remaining in session, were prorogued till the autumn. All had depended on the election being carried out before the secret was disclosed; ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... right or wrong? Who can decide? Have beasts or men most claim to live? God wots! He is the unit, we the cipher-dots. Ranged in the order a great hunt should have, They soon between the trunks espy the cave. "Yes, that is it! the very mouth of the den!" The trees all round it muttered, warning men; Still they kept step and neared it. Look you now, Company's pleasant, and there were a thou— Good Lord! ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... with other places was cut off. It was long since the fifth belonging to the Crown had been remitted to Castile; as Pizarro had appropriated them for his own use. He now took possession of the mints, broke up the royal stamps, and issued a debased coin, emblazoned with his own cipher.17 It was the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... and yet with eager impatience, I opened the packet and trimmed my lamp. Conceive my dismay when I found the whole written in an unintelligible cipher. I present the reader ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness; and so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children cease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energetic and determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of them strong enough to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble: that is how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur to our memory so ironically ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... 1796, Tone, who had sailed from Belfast the previous June, arrived at Havre from New York, possessed of a hundred guineas and some useful letters of introduction. One of these letters, written in cipher, was from the French Minister at Philadelphia to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles Lacroix; another was to the American Minister in France, Mr. Monroe, afterwards President of the United States, by whom he was most kindly ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... "Let me cipher it out." Amos Green sat on a fallen maple with his head sunk upon his hands. "Well," said he presently, "if it's no good going on, and no good going back, there's only one way, and that is to go to one side. That's so, Ephraim, ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle

... his childhood. He learned to read, write, and cipher at a small school kept by Hobby, the sexton of the parish church. Among his playmates was Richard Henry Lee, who was afterward a famous Virginian. When the boys grew up, they wrote to each other of grave matters of war and state, but here is ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various

... of life that wavest wings of gold, Thou songless wanderer mid the songful birds, With Nature's secrets in thy tints unrolled Through gorgeous cipher, past the reach of words, Yet dear to every child In glad pursuit beguiled, Living his unspoiled days mid flowers and flocks ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... dispatch from Rome so cunningly and secretly contrived in cipher had yet contained no warning that Escovedo's share in this should be concealed. There are none so imprudent as the sly. I sought the King at once, and told him all that I had learnt. He was aghast. Indeed, I never saw him more near to anger. For Philip of Spain was not the man ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... character, and his remark was received with good-natured laughter. Under cover of the noise, Baker whispered to Lloyd: "Stanton has discovered his cipher code book has been tampered with. Meet me at my office at ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... when hearing of the precious relic, he sent for it, and added it to the other relics of Mohammed in the imperial treasury at Constantinople; giving to the convent, in return, a copy of the original certified with his own cipher. I have seen the latter, which is kept in the Sinai convent at Cairo, but I do not believe it to be an authentic document. None of the historians of Mohammed, who have recorded the transactions of almost every day of his life, mention his having been at Mount Sinai, ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... Nay, hold! fix over it our proclamation of ten thousand florins for the heretic's head! Ten thousand? methinks that is too much now—we will alter the cipher. Meanwhile Rinaldo Orsini, Lord Senator, march thy soldiers to St. Angelo; let us see if the heretic can stand ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... word of Arab origin signifying a cipher, and employed to denote a neutral point in scale between an ascending and descending series, or between positive ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... with that city. So that up to the last moment you were in constant expectation of hearing that the whole of Boeotia was laid at the feet of Thebes. With the late incidents all is changed. You need fear Thebes no longer. One brief despatch (27) in cipher will suffice to procure a dutiful subservience to your every wish in that quarter, provided only you will take as kindly an interest in us ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon

... had been at work with his slow but accurate thought, framing in secret the most momentous document in American history since the Declaration of Independence. He did this in the cipher-room of the War Department telegraph office, where he was accustomed to spend anxious hours waiting for news from the boys at the front, and also to seek what rest he could in thus hiding away from the never-ending stream of tormentors, office-seekers, politicians ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers

... pincushion made of crimson satin, ornamented with gold beads and frilled with thread-lace, I had the same right to know it as to know the screens—I had made it myself. Rising with a start from the bed, I took the cushion in my hand and examined it. There was the cipher "L. L. B." formed in gold beds, and surrounded with an oval wreath embroidered in white silk. These were the initials of my godmother's name—Lonisa ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... Alonso Fajardo made his appearance, in the place assigned to the city, taking as his companion Captain Don Juan Claudio de Verastegui. They were clad in robes of tawny-colored satin embroidered with gold and silver edging. For his cipher the governor had an "S" crowned with palms at the sides, and with scrolls at the foot. On his shield was a blue band, and on that a heart that two hands were opening, with a device as follows: "Well broken, but ill requited." His ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various

... reading cipher, indicates that you are interested in literary researches, and by constant study you will become well acquainted with the habits and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... well-dressed, and often much better tricked out than the richest girls in Issoudun, she sported a gold watch and jewels, given by the doctor to encourage her studies, and she had a master who taught her to read, write, and cipher. But the almost animal life of the true peasant had instilled into Flore such deep repugnance to the bitter cup of knowledge, that the doctor stopped her education at that point. His intentions with regard to the child, ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... dusting, washing, the coarser needlework, and such other things as she would require to know when she came to be a woman; but carelessly allowed her to gather up the crumbs of such instruction as he bestowed on her playmate Ned, and thus learn to read, write, and cipher; which, to say the truth, was about as far in the way of scholarship as little ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Kandahar, although, as Hartington said, this meant, to India, an expenditure of four millions sterling a year, on local troops, for no military return.... The Queen ... at this moment was not only protesting strongly with regard to Kandahar, but also, in cipher ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... Trogool upon the utter Rim turned a page that was numbered six in a cipher that none might read. And as the golden ball went through the sky to gleam on lands and cities, there came the Fog towards it, stooping as he walked with his dark brown cloak about him, and behind him slunk the Night. And as the golden ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

... and not the actor of it? Why, every fault's condemned ere it be done. Mine were the very cipher of a function, To fine the faults whose fine stands in record, And let go by the actor. Measure for Measure, Act ii. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... Helen, in the new sphere on which she had entered. At home the latter was more petted and caressed, the object of deeper tenderness, but there she reigned supreme, and the pet of the household would find herself nothing more than a cipher. She was mistaken. It was impossible to look upon Helen without interest, and Master Hightower seemed especially drawn towards her. He bent down till he overshadowed her with his loftiness, then smiling at the quick withdrawal ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz

... London. I want it to be taken from the Custom-House, dooties paid etc., and dispatched to Miss ——, New York. Hold your tongue, and don't laugh, you rogue. Why shouldn't she have her paper, and I my pleasure, without your wicked, wicked sneers and imperence? I'm only a cipher in the young lady's estimation, and why shouldn't I sigh for her if I like. I hope I shall see you all at Boston before very long. I always consider Boston as my native ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... and anchor, and his Majesty's cipher on the appointments of the dead officer, he became convinced of our quality, and changed his tone—"Es verdad, son de la marina Englesa. But, gentlemen, were there not three ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... endless meanings were deducible from the numerical value of Biblical words, that not a curl at the tail of a letter of any word in any sentence but had its supersubtle significance. The elaborate cipher with which Bacon is alleged to have written Shakspeare's plays was mere child's play compared with the infinite revelations which in Karlkammer's belief the Deity left latent in writing the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi, and in inspiring the Talmud and the holier treasures of Hebrew ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... pursued, "what I am I must remain. I haven't what's called a principle of growth." Making marks in the earth with her umbrella she appeared to cipher it out. "I'm about as good as I can be—and about as bad. If Mr. Longdon can't ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... cipher. [Reads. 'Sir Peter Carew fled to France: it is thought the Duke will be taken. I am with you still; but, for appearance sake, stay with the Queen. Gardiner knows, but the Council are all at odds, and the Queen hath no force for resistance. Move, ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... time and great batin' about the bush, that the ould count came in; but the sight of a sacret cipher did ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... silently to the end that he might cast out of his heart, for all time, the love for a woman which had crept in. Sleep had dared not come within range of that titanic struggle. Worn with the battle which had witnessed his defeat, he had just completed his cipher message, when, following a modest knock at the door, Josef entered complacently with the pent-browed ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... of trust and confidence, was the man who stole it. For it he was offered a sum of money which would make him independent for life, and under the temptation he weakened and he stole it. But first he stole the key to the cipher, which would make it possible for anyone having both the key and the message to decode the message. Once this is done the damage is done, for the signature is ample proof of the validity of the document. That is the one thing ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... sentence: "Put the small curtains on the window of the place where I told you to bury the nail...." We can imagine Licquet with his head in his hands trying to solve this enigma. The muslin fichu, the little curtains, the nail—was this a cipher decided on in advance between the prisoners? And all these precautions seemed to be taken for the mysterious d'Ache whose safety seemed to be their sole desire. A word from Mme. de Combray to Bonnoeil leaves no doubt as to ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre

... Snow Hill in the year of 1896, and there remained for eight years receiving instruction at the hand of a loyal band of self-sacrificing teachers, who not only taught me how to read, write and to cipher, but in addition they taught me lessons of thrift and industry which have proven to be the main saving point ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards

... pile of mail which he had just received, and which the coming of Calhoun had interrupted him in reading. Hurriedly running over the letters, he picked out one, and opened it with nervous fingers. It was written in cipher. Opening a secret drawer in his desk, he took out the key to the cipher, and began the translation of the dispatch. As he did so, he gave vent to his surprise ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn

... taught, or rather directed in their upward development, by mere specialists—doctors of philosophy, who know everything about nothing, and nothing about everything. Nor do I want them directed by men and women who are obliged to "cipher on page twenty while the class is working on page nineteen." But I do want them directed by men and women who are thoroly acquainted with the subjects which they teach, and who know how to handle the same; but especially by men and women of broad, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd

... fodder. I say Abe was awful lazy, he would laugh and talk, and crack jokes all the time, didn't love work, but did dearly love his pay." He liked to lie under a shade tree, or up in the loft of the cabin and read, cipher, or scribble. At night he ciphered by the light of the fire on the wooden fire shovel. He practised stump oratory by repeating the sermons, and sometimes by preaching himself to his brothers and sister. His gifts in the rhetorical ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... Napoleon was Antichrist, and would one day escape from his island prison to exercise universal sway on earth. Nay, some good folk had even declared the letters of Napoleon's name to constitute the Apocalyptic cipher! ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... officer, though I have given a good deal of attention to the study of nautical subjects in connection with this enterprise, and I am not a cipher," continued Corny, after he had handed the sealed envelope to his companion. "I expect to be treated with reasonable consideration, even while I defer to you in all nautical matters. Let ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... came by return of post: "It is almost, or quite, as good as can be. Send me another." So forthwith I sent him 'God's Garrison', and it was quickly followed by 'The Three Outlaws', 'The Tall Master', 'The Flood', 'The Cipher', 'A Prairie Vagabond', and several others. At length came 'The Stone', which brought a telegram of congratulation, and finally 'The Crimson Flag'. The acknowledgment of that was a postcard containing these all too-flattering words: "Bravo, Balzac!" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... struggle 'twixt love and duty. No, not duty: I might have sheathed my sword, and wronged no one; I was but a cipher among thousands, whose blade would scarcely have been missed. Nor would I have wronged myself. I was simply, as I have already declared, an adventurer. The country for which I fought could not claim me; I was bound by no political conscience, ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... is the machine. A king is not to be deposed by halves. If he is not everything in the command of an army, he is nothing. What is the effect of a power placed nominally at the head of the army, who to that army is no object of gratitude or of fear? Such a cipher is not fit for the administration of an object of all things the most delicate, the supreme command of military men. They must be constrained (and their inclinations lead them to what their necessities require) by a real, vigorous, effective, decided, personal authority. The authority ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... down at the table and takes a pen in his hand.] Well, I shall send a cipher telegram to the Embassy at Vienna, to inquire if there is anything known against her. There may be some secret scandal she might be ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde

... sockets fixed at a right angle with the spout. The lid is a high cone surmounted by a small vase-shaped finial, and is hinged to the upper socket of the handle. On no part of the pot is there any ornamentation other than the royal cipher of King William III and Queen Mary, which is engraved on the reverse side of the body. This example, which measures nine inches in height to the top of its cover, resembles very closely in form the East India Company's tea-pot just referred to; but as ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... on his bed with his pillows propping him up, and a drawer open on the bed, and bundles of old letters and bills spread out before him. Old love letters; old business letters; his mother's letters to him when he was a boy at Edinburgh College; letters in cipher that no human eye can read but those old, bleared, weeping eyes that fill that too late drawer with their tears. The old voyager is looking over his papers before he takes ship. And he comes on things he had totally forgotten: debts he had thought ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte

... been a thoughtful youth, His name the record has not given, But if his heart imbibed the truth, 'Tis written in the books of heaven. A cipher in the multitude, He followed with his meager store, And far from his perception crude The ...
— The Mountain Spring And Other Poems • Nannie R. Glass

... papers he discovered a cipher letter from Rotterdam — probably from Quintana. Cipher was rather in Darragh's line. All ciphers are solved by similar methods, unless the key is contained in a code book known only ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... catastrophes, Baron Hulot's dismissal, and the knowledge that he was a mere cipher in that immense stir of men and interests and things which makes Paris at once a paradise and a hell, quite quelled Lisbeth Fischer. She gave up all idea of rivalry and comparison with her cousin after feeling her great superiority; but envy still lurked in her heart, like a plague-germ ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... they might get right ideas of their religious duty. Even after this aim was outgrown, our schools for generations did little more than to teach the use of the mere tools of knowledge; to read, to write, and to cipher were the great gains of the schoolroom. Even geography and grammar were rather late arrivals. Then came the idea that the school should train children for citizenship, and it was argued that the chief reason why schools ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield



Words linked to "Cipher" :   budget, process, average out, zippo, common man, naught, nil, subtract, small fry, add together, average, factor, secret code, quantize, encrypt, Fanny Adams, whippersnapper, nobody, math, work out, prorate, add, cryptograph, solve, null, pip-squeak, extrapolate, nought, nihil, zip, common person, squirt, zero, compute, interpolate, relative quantity, guess, approximate, divide, gauge, encode, message, integrate, nada, calculate, estimate, maths, reckon, aught, fraction, factor out, recalculate, extract, inscribe, quantise, nix, reason, capitalize, misestimate, capitalise, commoner, code, take off, figure, encipher, mathematics, digit, nonentity, differentiate, multiply, factor in, jackanapes



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com