Difference between Encryption and Encoding

Encryption

Part of speech: noun

Definition: The process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special knowledge, key files, and/or passwords.

Example sentence: The government does things like insisting that all encryption programs should have a back door. But surely no one is stupid enough to think the terrorists are going to use encryption systems with a back door. The terrorists will simply hire a programmer to come up with a secure encryption scheme.

Encoding

Part of speech: verb

Definition: To convert (plain text) into code.

Part of speech: noun

Definition: The way in which symbols are mapped onto bytes, e.g. in the rendering of a particular font, or in the mapping from keyboard input into visual text.A conversion of plain text into a code or cypher form (for decoding by the recipient).