Word.ws English Dictionary

rail fence cipher

rail fence cipher noun: a transposition cipher in which the plain text is written in a zigzag fashion diagonally up and down on successive "rails" of an imaginary fence, and then the characters are read off in rows to obtain the ciphertext.

Noun

rail fence cipher (plural rail fence ciphers)

  1. A transposition cipher in which the plain text is written in a zigzag fashion diagonally up and down on successive "rails" of an imaginary fence, and then the characters are read off in rows to obtain the ciphertext.

Forms of rail fence cipher

pluralrail fence ciphers

Questions about rail fence cipher

What does rail fence cipher mean?
Rail fence cipher means a transposition cipher in which the plain text is written in a zigzag fashion diagonally up and down on successive "rails" of an imaginary fence, and then the characters are read off in rows to obtain the ciphertext.
What part of speech is rail fence cipher?
Rail fence cipher is a noun.
What is the plural of rail fence cipher?
The plural of rail fence cipher is rail fence ciphers.

Words near rail fence cipher in the dictionary

  1. rail cars
  2. rail drink
  3. rail drinks
  4. rail fare
  5. rail fares
  6. rail fence cipher
  7. rail fence ciphers
  8. rail flies
  9. rail fly
  10. rail freight
  11. rail gauge

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rail fence cipher (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “rail fence cipher.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rail_fence_cipher. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.