At present there are 2 wifi encryption standards - WEP (Wired Equivalence Privacy) and WPA/WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access).
WEP is rubbish - can be cracked in seconds, although it is enough to deter casual snoopers / neighbours!
WPA is what you want. Note that home use will use PSK (pre-shared key) mode.
Unless of course you happen to have an 802.11x authentication server lying around.
SD