Library / English Dictionary

DECIPHER

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (verb) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Read with difficulty

Example:

The archeologist traced the hieroglyphs

Synonyms:

decipher; trace

Classified under:

Verbs of thinking, judging, analyzing, doubting

Hypernyms (to "decipher" is one way to...):

read (interpret something that is written or printed)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s something

Sense 2

Meaning:

Convert code into ordinary language

Synonyms:

decipher; decode; decrypt

Classified under:

Verbs of telling, asking, ordering, singing

Hypernyms (to "decipher" is one way to...):

rewrite (write differently; alter the writing of)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s something

Derivation:

decipherer (a reader capable of reading and interpreting illegible or obscure text)

decipherer (the kind of intellectual who converts messages from a code to plain text)

decipherment (the activity of making clear or converting from code into plain text)

Credits

 Context examples: 

They used a technique called X-ray crystallography to decipher the structure of the enzyme when borrelidin interacts with it.

(Scientists Discover Antibiotic Mechanism, NIH)

An environmental remnant of the past (pollen grains, tree rings, lake sediments, pack rat middens, ice cores, coral skeletons) that assist researchers in deciphering past climate conditions through the use of scientifically proven dating techniques.

(Paleoenvironmental proxy, NOAA Paleoclimate Glossary)

At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open—a roll of paper appears—you seize it—it contains many sheets of manuscript—you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher 'Oh! Thou—whomsoever thou mayst be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall'—when your lamp suddenly expires in the socket, and leaves you in total darkness.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening, he engaged with a powerful lens deciphering the remains of the original inscription upon a palimpsest, I deep in a recent treatise upon surgery.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It was a dull gray landscape, and as I gradually deciphered the details of it I realized that it represented a long and enormously high line of cliffs exactly like an immense cataract seen in the distance, with a sloping, tree-clad plain in the foreground.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Some of the brain areas close to the visual cortex, which deciphers visual images, tracked how human-like the images were, by changing their activity the more human-like an artificial agent became – in a sense, creating a spectrum of ‘human-likeness’.

(Scientists identify possible source of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ in the brain, University of Cambridge)

Of these hairs (as I had always a mechanical genius) I likewise made a neat little purse, about five feet long, with her majesty’s name deciphered in gold letters, which I gave to Glumdalclitch, by the queen’s consent.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)