undeciphered
1
9.0
- adjective
- /ˌʌndɪˈsaɪfərd/
:
indescifrado
- Many of the ancient manuscripts in the library remain undeciphered, leaving historians puzzled about their contents.
- undeciphered script
- still undeciphered
Examples
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All the Mayan sites have a large number of stone steles inscribed with a series of dates, which can be translated, and texts, which remain largely undeciphered.
Academic text (1990) -
Though the Meroitic kingdom disintegrated by the end of the fourth century A.D., leaving behind an undeciphered script, small Christian kingdoms in the region survived until about 1500.
Academic text (2006) -
And then there were these stones that have these undeciphered characters.
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Because the Indus script remains undeciphered, what we know of this society must be gleaned from the archaeological record alone, especially stone and metal artifacts.
Academic text (2008) -
The glyphs with the frieze are still undeciphered, but they push back the beginnings of Maya writing by more than three centuries.
Academic text (2006) -
PHOTO (COLOR): Rock engravings showing Garamantian "cavalry" accompanied by as yet undeciphered inscriptions in Libyco-Berber, a writing system that dates to the third century B.C.
Academic text (2004) -
Recent work on the undeciphered and probably multilingual inscriptions at Uruk suggests that the position of numerical signs on tablets was sometimes used to change the meaning of the signs, so that numbers would not have had stable meanings apart from their positions on the marked surface.
Academic text (1995) -
The archaeologists were excited to discover a tablet with undeciphered symbols that could unveil the history of the ancient civilization.
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The professor studied a collection of undeciphered texts, hoping to unlock the secrets of a lost language.
Synonyms
84
3.8
Not explained or answered after careful study
Something people have not explained or given a meaning
Antonyms
How Deciphered
Surface Forms
Morphology
undeciphered = deciphered (transparent) = un + decipher + ed
The word is formed by negating the past-participle/adjective 'deciphered' with the productive prefix 'un-', yielding the straightforward meaning 'not deciphered'.
Etymology
Undeciphered is un- ('not') plus decipher, which means 'to read a code', and the part cipher means 'code' (it comes from an old Arabic word for 'zero'). So undeciphered means 'not yet solved or read', like a message or inscription that you cannot understand.