Other forms: deciphered, deciphering, deciphers
To decipher is to work out the meaning of a code or of terrible handwriting. Decipher the code, hard to decipher, decipher his writing.
The serious sense is cryptographic: deciphering enemy messages, which is what Bletchley Park did. The everyday sense is lighter — deciphering a doctor's note, a scrawled address. It also covers reading damaged or ancient text, as with an inscription. Note decipherable, indecipherable; and that decode and decipher are near-synonyms, with decipher preferred when the difficulty is the reading rather than the system.
1verbdecipherTo work out the meaning of a code or unclear writing.
“I couldn't decipher the doctor's handwriting on the prescription.”
decipher is an act of working out meaning.
Also accepted in games: decode
It is de- plus cipher, from Arabic sifr, zero or empty. Zero and cipher are the same word, and a cipher came to mean a secret code because the Arabic numerals themselves looked like a mystery.
Arabic
صِفْر — zero, empty
Old French
cyfre
Middle English
cifre
English
cipher
English, today
decipher
Built from
As decypher, but not retaining the y from the Old French - etyma of cipher (cyfre, cyffre); the i spelling tends to be preferred etymologically, being consistent with its cognates, the French déchiffrer and the Italian decifrare, and with their common ancestor, the Medieval Latin cifra, cifera, ciphra. by surface analysis, de- + cipher. cipher 14th century. From Middle English cifre, from Old French cyfre, cyffre (French chiffre), ultimately from Arabic صِفْر (“zero, empty”), from صَفَرَ (“to be empty”). a doublet of chiffre and zero. Sense 8 (a fault in an organ valve) may be a different word.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA