plain text

• plaintext usually a single compound word in cryptography.

• Rhymes: -ɛkst

plain text (uncountable)

1. (cryptography) Text or any data that is to be encrypted (as opposed to ciphertext).

   Using the sophisticated code was useless since the spy merely stole the plain text from the waste basket.

2. (file format) Human readable text which consists only of a string of characters, represented using a character encoding such as ASCII or Unicode. In the file format sense, plain text may represent structured data in a human readable format such as XML.
   • 1988, Michael M. McDonnell, A simple computer data base system for UNIX‎^[1]:

     This simple flat-file database has proven valuable as a way of maintaining and accessing an inventory file and an address file. The data file is a plain text file containing no control characters aside from new lines. The file is therefore easy to create and maintain using ordinary text editors

3. (computing) Data which consists only of human-readable unformatted text, as opposed to machine-readable binary data or formatted/structured text. In this sense, the character data in between XML tags may be called "plain text".

• (cryptography) cleartext, (file format) text file, (computing) flat text

• (cryptography) ciphertext, (computing) rich text

plain text (not comparable)

1. (cryptography, computing) Alternative spelling of plaintext