Psi (letter) Psi (letter) Psi (; uppercase ', lowercase '; "psi" ) is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and has a numeric value of 700. In both Classical and Modern Greek, the letter indicates the combination /ps/ (as in English word "lapse"). For Greek loanwords in Latin and modern languages with Latin alphabets, psi is usually transliterated as "ps". The letter's origin is uncertain. It may or may not derive from the Phoenician alphabet. It appears in the 7th century BC, expressing /ps/ in the Eastern alphabets, but /kʰ/ in the Western alphabets (the sound expressed by Χ in the
The Alphabet Cipher The Alphabet Cipher Lewis Carroll published "The Alphabet-Cipher" in 1868, possibly in a children's magazine. It describes what is known as a Vigenère cipher, a well-known scheme in cryptography. While Carroll calls this cipher "unbreakable", Kasiski had published a volume describing how to break such ciphers from five years earlier, and Charles Babbage had secretly found ways to break polyalphabetic ciphers during the Crimean War. The piece begins with a tabula recta. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Each column of this table forms a dictionary of symbols representing the alphabet: thus, in the A column, the symbol is the same as the letter represented;