1. This word has multiple senses. Historically, it comes the standard English word meaning that main body of a printed or written work. For example, the text of a letter somebody sent you distinguishes the body of the letter from the envelope or the greeting. In cryptography, the word TEXT means anything you might want to encrypt, where the words plaintext indicates the message before you encrypt it and ciphertext indicates the message after you encrypt it. In other areas of computer science, there is text data and binary data. The phrase "text" generally means human readable data, such as English text, whereas the word binary indicates data that can only be read by the computer. Misunderstanding: We sometimes encrypt binary data, in which case the binary data forms that plain text of the message. Conversely, the body of a binary program that runs is often referred to as the TEXT of the program. In both these particular areas, the word "TEXT" is indicating the oppose meaning of the general usage. From Hacking-Lexicon

2. n. 1. [techspeak] Executable code, esp. a `pure code' portion shared between multiple instances of a program running in a multitasking OS. Compare English. 2. Textual material in the mainstream sense; data in ordinary ASCII or EBCDIC representation (see flat-ASCII). "Those are text files; you can review them using the editor." These two contradictory senses confuse hackers, too. From Jargon Dictionary