Indeed and used cleverly in Casino Royale by naming Le Chiffre that way.
replyI knew 'sifr' was an Arabic word and only today I came to know that it works in Farsi too.
The double pun/irony is that the John Sipher's surname is related to the topic of cryptography and that the etymological roots is Middle-Eastern.
Also Hindi, Urdu, and no doubt others if we're drawing lines :) – there's an awful lot of overlap/loanwords.
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