Alice and Bob need to send secret messages to each other and are discussing ways to encode their messages:
Alice: “Let’s just use a very simple code: We’ll assign ‘A’ the code word 1, ‘B’ will be 2, and so on down to ‘Z’ being assigned 26.”
Bob: “That’s a stupid code, Alice. Suppose I send you the word ‘BEAN’ encoded as 25114. You could decode that in many different ways!”
Alice: “Sure you could, but what words would you get? Other than ‘BEAN’, you’d get ‘BEAAD’, ‘YAAD’, ‘YAN’, ‘YKD’ and ‘BEKD’. I think you would be able to figure out the correct decoding. And why would you send me the word ‘BEAN’ anyway?”