Editing Cipher (section)

==Versus codes==
{{Main|Code (cryptography)}}
In casual contexts, "code" and "cipher" can typically be used interchangeably; however, the technical usages of the words refer to different concepts. Codes contain meaning; words and phrases are assigned to numbers or symbols, creating a shorter message. 

An example of this is the [[commercial code (communications)|commercial telegraph code]] which was used to shorten long telegraph messages which resulted from entering into commercial contracts using exchanges of [[telegram]]s.

Another example is given by whole word ciphers, which allow the user to replace an entire word with a symbol or character, much like the way written Japanese utilizes [[Kanji]] (meaning Chinese characters in Japanese) characters to supplement the native Japanese characters representing syllables. An example using English language with Kanji could be to replace "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" by "The quick brown 狐 jumps 上 the lazy 犬". [[Shorthand|Stenographers]] sometimes use specific symbols to abbreviate whole words.

Ciphers, on the other hand, work at a lower level: the level of individual letters, small groups of letters, or, in modern schemes, individual bits and blocks of bits. Some systems used both codes and ciphers in one system, using [[superencipherment]] to increase the security. In some cases the terms ''codes'' and ''ciphers'' are used synonymously with ''substitution'' and ''transposition'', respectively.

Historically, cryptography was split into a dichotomy of codes and ciphers, while coding had its own terminology analogous to that of ciphers: "''encoding'', ''codetext'', ''decoding''" and so on.

However, codes have a variety of drawbacks, including susceptibility to [[cryptanalysis]] and the difficulty of managing a cumbersome [[codebook]]. Because of this, codes have fallen into disuse in modern cryptography, and ciphers are the dominant technique.