BCA - Network Technologies

Cryptography, by definition, is the conversion of recognized data into an encrypted code for transmission across a network (either trusted or untrusted).
Data is encrypted at the source, that is, at the sender's end, and decrypted at the receiver's end.

The initial unencrypted data is referred to as plaintext in all circumstances.
It's encrypted into cypher text, which is then decoded into usable plaintext using various encryption techniques (typically).