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PlainSpell

steganography

/ˌstɛ.ɡəˈnɔ.ɡɹə.fi/noun

steganography is a noun meaning “The art and science of concealing a secret message, data, or file within another innocuous message, image, audio file, or physical object in a way…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled S-T-E-G-A-N-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y and has 5 syllables, and it appears about once in every 15 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does steganography mean?

noun

  1. 1

    The art and science of concealing a secret message, data, or file within another innocuous message, image, audio file, or physical object in a way that hides the very existence of the hidden information from casual observation.

  2. 2

    The use of small computer files to communicate secret information.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce steganography?

  • UK /ˌstɛɡ.ənˈɒɡ.ɹə.fi/
  • US /ˌstɛ.ɡəˈnɔ.ɡɹə.fi/

Steganography has 5 syllables (counted from the pronunciation).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-steganography.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

How common is steganography?

Steganography appears about once in every 15 million words in written English, the 115,751st most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Steganography in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense steganography:

LanguageWords
Frenchstéganographie
GermanSteganographie
Portugueseesteganografia
Spanishesteganografía

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does steganography come from?

From Ancient Greek στεγανός (steganós, “cover, roof”) + -graphy.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).