Ciphertext

Okay, so when you want to send a secret message to someone, you can't just write it down in words that everyone can understand, right? That would spoil the whole secret! So what you do is turn your message into something that looks like a bunch of random letters and numbers. This is called ciphertext.

To turn your message into ciphertext, you use something called a code or a cipher. It's like a secret way of changing the letters in your message into different ones. Only the person who knows the code can turn the ciphertext back into the original message!

So let's say your message was "I love ice cream." You might use a code that says every letter is turned into the letter 3 letters down from it in the alphabet. So "I" would become "L", "L" would become "O", and so on. When you apply this cipher to the whole message, it would look something like this: "L oryh lfhv fpelq."

Now the person you're sending the message to can't read it unless they know the code. But once they do, they can turn the ciphertext back into the original message by doing the opposite of what you did to create it. In this case, if they shift each letter back 3 places in the alphabet, they'll get "I love ice cream" again.

So that's ciphertext in a nutshell - it's secret, coded messages that only the person with the code can read!