ciphering

Pluralcipherings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of cipher.

   Ciphering every cable by hand kept the embassy staff busy until midnight.

   During the hymn, one of the organ's pipes began ciphering and droned on after the chord had ended.

   Note

   What follows the form shows which cipher is at work. With a message as its object it means putting the text into code; used alone it can mean the dated business of working out sums, or an organ pipe sounding when no one plays it. The old sense of deciphering is obsolete.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A fault in an organ valve that makes a pipe sound continuously even though its key has not been pressed.

   A ciphering in the swell division droned through the entire sermon.

   The organ builder traced the ciphering to a sticking valve beneath the pipes.

   Note

   Organ builders treat it as a mechanical fault: a valve beneath the pipe sticks open or leaks, wind keeps reaching the pipe, and the note sounds with no one at the keys. The fault is also called simply a cipher, and the pipe itself is said to cipher.

3. 3
   nounarchaic

   A calculation: an instance of working out a result with numbers.

   By the clerk's ciphering, the farm owed forty dollars in back taxes.

   The margins of the ledger were crowded with cipherings in faded pencil.

   Note

   Modern English has mostly let this noun go; a writer today would say calculation or sum, and ciphering has an old-fashioned ring. It is the verb form in its sense of working out sums, turned into an ordinary countable noun, so a page of figures holds cipherings. Keep it apart from the organ fault, where ciphering is a fault that keeps a pipe sounding.

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