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scytale.

A cylinder with a strip of parchment wound around it on which a message is written, used for cryptography by the ancient Spartans.

7 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈsɪtəliː//ˈskɪt-/
  1. A cylinder with a strip of parchment wound around it on which a message is written, used for cryptography by the ancient Spartans.

    historical
Where this word comes from

From Latin scytale (“cylinder used for encoding and decoding”), from Ancient Greek σκυτάλη (skutálē, “club, baton, cylinder used for encoding and decoding”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.