(1) A room completely or partly underground, especially under the main floor of a church. (2) A room or area in a large aboveground tomb.

Hidden under the main floor of a great church is often a large room, often with a tomb as its centerpiece. Many major European churches were built over the remains of a saint—the Vatican's great St. Peter's Basilica is an example—and instead of having the coffin buried, it was often given its spacious room below ground level. In a large aboveground tomb, or *mausoleum*, there may be several small chambers for individual coffins, also called crypts; when the comic book *Tales from the Crypt* made its first appearance in 1950, it was this meaning that the authors were referring to.

(1) To convert into cipher. (2) To convert a message into code.

Codes aren't always in another language; people have always been able to communicate in ways that conceal their real meaning. In countries ruled by dictators, novelists and playwrights have sometimes managed to encrypt their messages, conveying political ideas to their audiences so that the authorities never notice. But *encryption* today usually refers to a complex procedure performed on electronic text to make sure the wrong people—whether a nation's enemies or a business competitor (most businesses use encryption today)—can't read it. And sensitive data that merely resides on a company's own computers is often encrypted as well.

(1) Mysterious; puzzlingly short. (2) Acting to hide or conceal.

Until the writing on the famous Rosetta Stone was finally translated in the early 19th century, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was entirely cryptic, its meaning hidden from the modern world. In the same way, a cryptic comment is one whose meaning is unclear, and a cryptic note may leave you wondering. Cryptic coloring among plants and animals acts like camouflage; so, for example, some moths that are tasty to blue jays are *cryptically* colored to look like bugs that jays won't touch.

(1) Secret writing. (2) The encoding and decoding of messages.

During World War II, cryptography became an extremely complex science for both the Allied and Axis powers. The Allies managed to secretly crack the code produced by the Nazis' Enigma machine, and thereby may have shortened the war by two years. The Axis *cryptographers,* on the other hand, never managed to crack the Americans' ultimate code—the spoken languages of the Navajo and other American Indians. In the age of computers, cryptography has become almost unbelievably complex; it's widely used in peacetime in such areas as banking telecommunications.

To depart in secret and hide.

Wagner's massive four-part opera *The Ring of the Nibelung* begins with a dwarf absconding with gold which he turns into a magic ring. And in J. R. R. Tolkien's *The Hobbit,* Bilbo Baggins absconds from Gollum's caves with the ring he has found, the ring Gollum calls “my precious” ; what follows is detailed in the three-volume *Lord of the Rings.* (Tolkien knew Wagner's opera well.) A young couple might abscond from their parents to get married, but sooner or later they must face those parents again.

Restrained, especially in the consumption of food or alcohol.

Many 14th-century monks lived by the Rule of St. Benedict, which demands an abstemious life of obedience and poverty. But not all monks could maintain such abstemious habits. Chaucer's *Canterbury Tales* contains a portrait of a fat monk who is supposed to follow a vegetarian diet but instead is an enthusiastic hunter who loves a juicy swan best. He justifies breaking the Rule by saying that it's old-fashioned and that he's just keeping up with modern times. *Abstemious* itself has a slightly old-fashioned sound today, especially in a country where everyone is constantly encouraged to consume.

The consideration of a thing or idea without associating it with a particular example.

From its roots, *abstraction* should mean basically “something pulled or drawn away.” So *abstract* art is art that has moved away from painting objects of the ordinary physical world in order to show something beyond it. Theories are often abstractions; so a theory about economics, for instance, may “pullback” to take a broad view that somehow explains all of economics (but maybe doesn't end up explaining any of it very successfully). An *abstract* of a medical or scientific article is a one-paragraph summary of its contents—that is, the basic findings “pulled out” of the article.

Hard to understand; deep or complex.

The original meaning of *abstruse,* coming almost straight from the Latin, was “concealed, hidden.” It's easy to see how the word soon came to describe the kind of language used by those who possess certain kinds of expert knowledge (and don't necessarily want to share it with other people). Scientific writing is often filled with the kind of abstruse special vocabulary that's necessary for exact and precise descriptions. Unfortunately, the language of a science like quantum physics can make an already difficult subject even more abstruse to the average person.