code

A short textual designation, often with little relation to the item it represents.

Noun

  1. A short textual designation, often with little relation to the item it represents.
    • This flavour of soup has been assigned the code WRT-9.
  2. A body of law, sanctioned by legislation, in which the rules of law to be specifically applied by the courts are set forth in systematic form; a compilation of laws by public authority; a digest.
    • the mild and impartial spirit which pervades the Code compiled under Canute - 1872, Francis Wharton, A Treatise on the Conflict of Laws:
  3. Any system of principles, rules or regulations relating to one subject.
    • The medical code is a system of rules for the regulation of the professional conduct of physicians.
    • The naval code is a system of rules for making communications at sea by means of signals.
  4. A set of rules for converting information into another form or representation.

    1. By synecdoche: a codeword, code point, an encoded representation of a character, symbol, or other entity.

      • The ASCII code of "A" is 65.
  5. A message represented by rules intended to conceal its meaning.
    • [Isaac Newton] was obsessed with alchemy. He spent hours copying alchemical recipes and trying to replicate them in his laboratory. He believed that the Bible contained numerological codes. - 2014 June 21, “Magician’s...
  6. A cryptographic system using a codebook that converts words or phrases into codewords.
  7. Instructions for a computer, written in a programming language; the input of a translator, an interpreter or a browser, namely: source code, machine code, bytecode.
    • Object-oriented C++ code is easier to understand for a human than C code.
    • I wrote some code to reformat text documents.
    • This HTML code may be placed on your web page.
  8. A program.
  9. A particular lect or language variety.
  10. An emergency requiring situation-trained members of the staff.
  11. A set of unwritten rules that bind a social group.
    • girl code

Origin

From Middle English code (“system of law”), from Old French code (“system of law”), from Latin cōdex, later form of caudex (“the stock or stem of a tree, a board or tablet of wood smeared over with wax, on which the ancients originally wrote; hence, a book, a writing.”). Doublet of codex. Verb etymology 1, verb sense 7 is an ellipsis of code blue (“medical emergency”).

Forms

codes

Hyponyms

Aztec code barcode binary code block code boilerplate code brevity code bytecode civil code clean code colour code dead code double code error code Gray code Green Cross Code hidden code machine code managed code Morse code Morton code opcode plumbing code position-independent code promo code

Related

codex codification codifier codify

Derived

absolute code access code account code area code autocode Aztec code barcode bar code Baudot code BBCode Beckett-Gray code binary code biocode BioCode bio-code block code blue code blue code of silence boilerplate code brevity code bro code building code bytecode byte code

Noun alt of, alternative

  1. Alternative form of cod.

Forms

codes

Verb

  1. To write software programs.
    • I learned to code on an early home computer in the 1980s.
  2. To add codes to (a data set).
    • The resulting citation collection was databased and coded for meaning, etymon, and date range (earliest and latest occurrence found). - 2018, James Lambert, “A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity”, in...
  3. To categorise by assigning identifiers from a schedule, for example CPT coding for medical insurance purposes.
  4. To encode.
    • We should code the messages we send out on Usenet.
  5. To encode a protein.
  6. To call a hospital emergency code.
    • coding in the CT scanner
  7. Of a patient, to suffer a sudden medical emergency (a code blue) such as cardiac arrest.

Forms

codes coding coded

Derived

BCD codability codable coder colour-code colour code cSNP decode encode hard-coded outcode overcode recode transcode uncode undercode upcode V-code