For a word having to do with secrets, cryptography has a surprisingly transparent origin. The word comes from Greek kryptós, meaning "hidden" or "secret," and graphein, meaning "to write." Besides the familiar related words of the same origin, such as cryptic, there is krypton, the name of a colorless gaseous element used especially in some fluorescent lamps and photography flashes. The name was chosen because the gas is rare and hard to find.
Example Sentences
Companies often use cryptography to protect private information.
Recent Examples on the WebThe latter have no choice but to tackle the unprecedented challenge by developing countermeasures such as post-quantum cryptography, which will itself require the use of quantum systems.Fortune, 2 Sep. 2022 Digital cryptography is used today to secure everything online, as well as all of our communications and information, such as military, commercial and national secrets. Bernard Marr, Forbes, 26 Aug. 2022 The results have left the post-quantum cryptography community both shaken and encouraged. Jordana Cepelewicz, Quanta Magazine, 24 Aug. 2022 Dziedzan also cited a talk that Meta engineers are giving at the Crypto academic cryptography conference in Santa Barbara this weekend as a reason for the timing.Wired, 13 Aug. 2022 End-to-end encryption, often abbreviated as E2EE, uses strong cryptography to encrypt messages with a key that is unique to each user. Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 11 Aug. 2022 The raison d’etre of many public institutions is the provision of public goods, and the underwriting of rights and the social contract – functions that blockchain’s pioneers sought to replace with cryptography, networks, and protocols. Lawrence Wintermeyer, Forbes, 6 Oct. 2021 Part of this initiative, Passkeys are based on the WebAuthn standard and use public key cryptography to secure your accounts. Kate O'flaherty, Forbes, 13 Aug. 2022 Unfortunately, any encryption is only as strong as its weakest link, and cryptography alone won’t keep your passwords safe. Scott Gilbertson, Wired, 1 Aug. 2022 See More
Word History
Etymology
borrowed from New Latin cryptographia, from crypto-crypto- + -graphia-graphy
Note: New Latin cryptographia was perhaps first used by the Limburg-born philologist Erycius Puteanus (Eric de Put, Eric van den Putte, 1574-1646) in "Cryptographia epistolica, sive de clandestina scriptione," an addendum to his Epistolarum reliquiae centuria V (Leuven/Louvain, 1612). An apparently more widely circulated work using the word was Cryptomenytices et cryptographiae libri IX (Lüneburg, 1624) by Gustavus Selenus, pseudonym of Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1579-1666).