Die Ziffer - always makes me think of James Bond

Two days ago, on Saturday, I went to order a notebook for use in my new evening class. The idea behind buying such a thing is to enable the class to watch online videos as projected onto the whiteboard by the digital projector.

When the sales assistant took down my contact details, I had to spell my e-mail address. As there are so many Joneses in the world, my e-mail address includes a number.

I spelt out the address and then said, "Und dann die Ziffer 4" ("And then number 4"). 

"Ziffer" means the individual number; you would never use it in the word "telephone number", for example. 

Every time I use the word, I think of James Bond, as Le Chiffre was one of the baddies in the first Bond book: Casino Royale. The role of the paymaster of the "Syndicat des Ouvriers d'Alsace",  a SMERSH-controlled trade union, was last played by the delectable (in my eyes at least) Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen in 2006 

And, of course, the name is very appropriate for a mysterious character as it as the root of the English verb "to decipher", which means to translate something from code into normal language.

I quote from the Online Etymology Dictionary

cipher (n.)

late 14c., "arithmetical symbol for zero," from Old French cifre "nought, zero," Medieval Latin cifra, which, with Spanish and Italian cifra, ultimately is from Arabic sifr "zero," literally "empty, nothing," from safara "to be empty;" a loan-translation of Sanskrit sunya-s "empty." Klein says Modern French chiffre is from Italian cifra. 

The word came to Europe with Arabic numerals. From "zero," it came to mean "any numeral" (early 15c.), then (first in French and Italian) "secret way of writing; coded message" (a sense first attested in English 1520s), because early codes often substituted numbers for letters. Meaning "the key to a cipher or secret writing" is by 1885, short for cipher key (by 1835).

And that, folks, is why I always get a bit of a thrill when I use the German word "Ziffer".