Word.ws English Dictionary

scytales

scytales is the plural of scytale.

Meaning of scytale

Noun

scytale (plural scytales)

  1. (historical) A cylinder with a strip of parchment wound around it on which a message is written, used for cryptography by the ancient Spartans.
    • But, being perſwaded that they would not hear any propoſal to that effect, he delivered each of them a ſcytale, or ſtaff on which the Lacedemonians wrote their ſecret letters, and with theſe diſpatch’d them home to the Ephori.1753, Desiderius Erasmus, anonymous translator, The Apophthegms of the Ancients, volume I, A. Millar, translation of Apophthegmatum opus (in New Latin), pages 53–54

Questions about scytales

What is scytales the plural of?
Scytales is the plural of scytale.

Words near scytales in the dictionary

  1. scyphozoa
  2. scyphozoan
  3. scyphozoans
  4. scyphus
  5. scytale
  6. scytales
  7. scytalinid
  8. scytalinids
  9. Scytalism
  10. Scytalismus
  11. scytalone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scytales (page history and authors); scytale (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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