The word came to Latin Europe with Arabic numbers in the 12th century. In Europe the meaning was originally numeral zero as a positionholder, then any positional numeral, then numerically encoded message. The last meaning, and decipher, dates from the 1520s in English, 1490s in French, 1470s in Italian.[1] But in English cipher also continued to be used as a word for nought or zero until the 19th century.[22]