Cryptic

 WORD OF THE DAY

cryptic / adjective / KRIP-tik

Definition
1: secret, occult
2a: having or seeming to have a hidden or ambiguous meaning
2b: mysterious
2c: marked by an often perplexing brevity
3a: serving to conceal
3b: exhibiting cryptic coloration
4: not recognized
5: employing cipher or code

Examples

"Major League Baseball teased an upcoming announcement Tuesday with a cryptic tweet captioned: 'Big things coming.' At this point, no one really knows what this means, except that whatever MLB plans to announce Wednesday might possibly maybe have something to do with the moon, which, in the mysterious tweet, was edited to look like a baseball hovering over the date, 6.23.21."
— Michelle R. Martinelli, USA Today, 22 June 2021

Madden's Ikaris, for example, can fly and shoot rays of light from his eyes, while Hayek's Ajak has the ability to heal, Henry's Phastos is a brilliant inventor, and Keoghan's Druig is a cryptic loner who can manipulate others' thoughts.
— Devan Coggan, EW.com, 18 Aug. 2021

Did You Know?
The history of cryptic starts with kryptein, a Greek word meaning "to hide."
Can you uncover other kryptein relatives in English? Not surprisingly, crypt, meaning "underground chamber," is one.
The element krypton would be another correct guess, and so would apocrypha, which can mean "writings of dubious authenticity."
Kryptein also gave us several words having to do with secret codes, such as cryptogram ("a communication in cipher or code") and cryptography ("the coding and decoding of secret messages").
And cryptocurrency is currency that exists digitally and that relies on computer encryption (secret code) to prevent counterfeiting and fraud.