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Can you keep a secret? How would you send a secret message? What if it fell into the wrong hands? Spies and the military of all nations have been sending secret messages since ancient times. They all developed ingenious codes to protect their battle plans and valuable information from prying eyes. The art of encoding or decoding these secret messages is called “cryptography.”

Howt owri tesec retmes sag esi nco de Can you guess what the title of this section says? If you look closely, you will see that it is “How to write secret messages in code,” with the spaces between words changed. That’s just one way to create a secret code. Another way is a system of cryptography called “ciphers”.

In the system of ciphers, letters of the alphabet are rearranged in different ways or letters are substituted for other letters. Here are just 3 examples of how ciphers are used to hide the sentence, “I HAVE A SECRET TO KEEP.”

1. Writing the sentence backwards: PEEK OT TERCES A EVAH I
2. Writing the sentence using the alphabet backwards from Z to A instead of A to Z so that A=”Z,” B=”Y,” C=”X,” D=”W” and so on: R SZEV Z HVXIVG GL PVVK
3. Writing the sentence using an alphabet with the letters rearranged, for example, G R Z M A O B Q C T U J K D E X P H Y I V L N Q W F (so that G=”A,” R=”B,” Z=C, M=”D,” and so on): C QGLA G YAZHAI IE UAAX

Numbers Another way to encode a message is to use numbers in place of some or all of the letters of the alphabet. If you know that 1=”S,” 2=”T,” 3=”R,” 4=”O,” 5=”G,” 6=”D,” 7=”P,” 8=”E,” 9=”A,” you can read the following message:

C4n5392ul92i4n1 4n 68c46in5 2hi1 18c382 m811958!