An analogy I like to use is a sum of numbers: You take your letters and substitute them for numbers, A = 1, Z = 26. Like a checksum, you add all the letters t

An analogy I like to use is a sum of numbers: You take your letters and substitute them for numbers, A = 1, Z = 26. Like a checksum, you add all the letters together. The same word produces the same sum each time, but if I had the sum, I wouldn't know for certain what the original word was.