The Enigma Machine Was Named for the Puzzle It Made
An enigma is a puzzling person or thing. The German cipher machine took the name deliberately.
An enigma is something difficult to understand. The Greek *ainigma* comes from a verb meaning to speak in riddles. The German cipher machine of the Second World War was named for exactly that quality, and the effort to break it at Bletchley Park produced both a decisive intelligence advantage and much of the foundation of modern computing.
- A puzzling person or thing. *He remains an enigma.*
- A riddle. *An ancient enigma.*
- Enigmatic — mysterious. *An enigmatic smile.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | enigma | A complete enigma. |
| Plural | enigmas | Unsolved enigmas. |
| Adjective | enigmatic | An enigmatic reply. |
| Adverb | enigmatically | Smiled enigmatically. |
| Related | riddle | An old riddle. |
How it is used in a sentence
- His motives remain an enigma.Unexplained.
- The Enigma machine used rotors.Cryptography.
- An enigmatic expression.Hard to read.
Breaking Enigma
- Rotors — changed the substitution with every letter typed
- Polish work — Marian Rejewski and colleagues broke early versions before the war
- Bletchley Park — the British codebreaking centre
- Bombe — the electromechanical machine used to test settings
- Cribs — guessed fragments of plaintext that narrowed the search
From Latin *aenigma*, from Greek *ainigma*, a riddle, from *ainissesthai*, to speak in riddles, from *ainos*, a tale.
Why was the machine called Enigma?
Because it produced a puzzle. The commercial version was marketed under the name before the military adopted it.
Who broke Enigma?
Polish cryptographers broke early versions in the 1930s, and the work continued at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing led key advances.