| 释义 |
rail-fence orig. U.S.
[f. rail n.2 + fence n.]
1. A fence made of wooden posts and rails. Hence rail fencing.
1649Charlestown (Mass.) Land Rec. (1878) 110, I doe sell..five Akers of planting Land,..Bounded on the..North by the ould raile fence. 1725Manchester (Mass.) Town Rec. (1889) 166 For making a rail fence from y⊇ s[ai]d pound. 1807Salmagundi 15 Oct. 331 Some..enjoy the varied and romantick scenery of..rail fences..potatoe patches, and log huts. 1848Webster, Rail-fence. a1864Hawthorne Grimshawe xii. (1891) 142 Simple and rustic as the gap in a rail fence. 1870Lowell Study Wind. 18 One of the male birds accompanies me, flitting from post to post of the rail-fence. 1902S. E. White Blazed Trail xxxix. 355 It was near the ‘pole⁓trail’, which was less like a trail than a rail-fence. 1924Lawrence & Skinner Boy in Bush i. 7 Her easy indifference to English rail-fences. 1945J. Horn in B. A. Botkin Lay my Burden Down 181 He was so fat he couldn't git through the fence. You know what sort of fence, a rail fence it was. 1968J. Arnold Shell Bk. Country Crafts v. 101 Rail fencing usually consists of cleft or sawn oak posts set at 9 ft intervals, each mortised to take three rows of rails. 1973L. Russell Everyday Life Colonial Canada ii. 32 Easiest to construct was the rail fence... Rails were about six inches in thickness and something like 12 feet long. 1979Yale Alumni Mag. Apr. 24/3 The rail fence, the center of campus life for many years, was originally erected in the 1830s.
2. Cryptology. A cipher or code obtained by splitting the plaintext between two or more lines in a zig-zag pattern (see quot. 1963). Also rail-fence cipher.
1939H. F. Gaines Elementary Cryptanalysis iii. 12 Passing on to irregular types [of cryptogram], we find these in all degrees of difficulty, from the very simple ‘rail fence’ to the formidable ‘U.S. Army’ double transposition. 1943J. M. Wolfe First Course in Cryptanalysis (rev. ed.) II. x. 1 During the Civil War the rail fence transposition was one of the cryptographic systems used as a field cypher. 1963D. Kahn Plaintext 16 The rail-fence cipher can extend the number of lines in which the plaintext is distributed beyond two... If the key is 3, the cipher is still a rail-fence. |