rot13: /rot ther'teen/ n.,v. [Usenet: from `rotate alphabet 13
places'] The simple Caesar-cypher encryption that replaces each
English letter with the one 13 places forward or back along the
alphabet, so that "The butler did it!" becomes "Gur ohgyre qvq vg!"
Most Usenet news reading and posting programs include a rot13
feature. It is used to enclose the text in a sealed wrapper that
the reader must choose to open -- e.g., for posting things that
might offend some readers, or spoilers. A major advantage of
rot13 over rot(N) for other N is that it is self-inverse, so the
same code can be used for encoding and decoding. See also spoiler
space, which has partly displaced rot13 since non-Unix-based
newsreaders became common.
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