Cool words

I’ve been doing some work with encryp­tion lately, so my code is speckled with calls to “encrypt” and “decrypt”, and I have been lux­u­ri­ating in the fact that those words are actu­ally supercool.

As a hierarchy: “encrypt” is cooler than “encryp­tion”, which is cooler than “cryptography”, all of which are WAY cooler than “crypto”, which is not cool at all. “Decrypt” might be the coolest, and it appears also to be the oldest of the bunch.

Here is Ety­mon­line on “cryptogram”:

A modern word coined in English; though the ele­ments are Greek, the ancient Greeks would find the con­struc­tion barbarous.