P-Nut in the cypher .

Cypher, or cipher, circle, circle of people "in the center of which b-boys and b-girls take turns dancing" . Music is sometimes considered a necessary component of the cypher .

The practice of dancing while surrounded by a circle of people is attested to during the earliest years of breaking, as well as the preceding Burning Era . Roger K recalls,

"you would hear [Apache] and you'd hear the beat and then the drums came in and you would see the B-Boy just go off!!! Crowds would form around them...circles....I mean way before MCs...circles and they would go off!"

Circles would form around (or in anticipation of) a battle or else an individual dancer or group of collaborating dancers . It was also not uncommon that, as Alien Ness puts it, "when the break came in, you was fighting for space" whereby opening the cypher would become an objective for the dance. The practice of competitive dance in a circle of onlookers has a long history accompanying the African diaspora .

Chang and Watkins position the cypher "at the core of hip-hop," writing, "partly for competition and partly for community, the cipher is the circle of participants and onlookers that closes around battling rappers or dancers as they improvise for each other. If you have the guts to step into the cipher and tell your story and, above all, demonstrate your uniqueness, you might be accepted into the community. Here is where reputations are made and risked and stylistic change is fostered" . Similarly, Schloss considers the cypher to be "the most authentic, challenging, and raw environment for b-boying" .

The word "cypher" (or "cipher") is derived from the Five-Percent Nation, where it referred especially to "the circles of people in which their lessons are propagated" . Cypher has an older meaning of the zero symbol, 0, via French, from Arabic, as a translation of Sanskrit śūnya (empty) . Ken Swift estimates that the word entered breaking around 1994-95, and considers it synonymous with the older term "circle" , while for Focus, the word was in use but still uncommon in 2002 . Johnson claims it first entered hip hop (through MCing) in the late 1980s and early 1990s . Schloss notes that "it is often referred to as 'the' cypher, rather than 'a' cypher, which suggests that all cyphers are, in some abstract way, connected" .