A guide to leetspeak

The internet has its own culture. The way internet users com­mu­nic­ate with each other and share ideas and thoughts follows certain rules and be­ha­vi­our­al patterns. New aspects of internet culture often emerge or­gan­ic­ally. One of these cultural char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the internet includes leetspeak. With this type of written com­mu­nic­a­tion, letters are replaced by numbers or other symbols.

The sim­il­ar­ity between the letters and cor­res­pond­ing numbers is key. With a little ima­gin­a­tion, for example, a 3 looks like a mirrored E. The number 7 also bears some re­semb­lance to the letter T. This way, internet users are easily able to un­der­stand “1337 5P34K” as “leetspeak”. But what exactly does “1337” or “leet” mean and how did this online code develop? Find out more in this article. We’ll also give you a handy leet alphabet.

Even in the early days of the internet, users often com­mu­nic­ated with each other on message and bulletin boards. These early websites were divided into certain sections. Users could exchange files in some areas, com­mu­nic­ate via chat in others, and read public entries, messages or posts in news sections. The users of these bulletin boards received user rights depending on their activ­it­ies. What a user could do on a board, which chat rooms they could access and whether they could share files largely depended on their status. Users with elite status had access to all board features.

The tradition of assigning elite status to par­tic­u­larly active and ex­per­i­enced internet users was adopted by pro­gram­mers, coders, and hackers with a certain degree of humour. To dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves from other internet users, the “leet” notation caught on as an ab­bre­vi­ation and dis­tor­tion of the word “elite”. The spelling using double “e” can be seen as a parody of the word by the creators of leetspeak.

On early messaging boards, filters were often used by ad­min­is­trat­ors in order to ban the use of certain words. For example, if users in chat rooms wrote about “hacking” or “cracking”, the filters would block the content. However, the “elite” of internet users – com­pris­ing pro­gram­mers and coders – were in­ter­ested in dis­cuss­ing these exact topics. To cir­cum­vent the filters, users developed leetspeak by replacing letters with similar-looking numbers and char­ac­ters. Filters were able to easily detect and block banned words like “hacker” or “ass”, but they had dif­fi­culty identi­fy­ing “H4x0r” or “@$$”.

So, what about the numbers 1337? If each of the numbers were mirrored along the vertical axis, you could easily imagine reading the word “LEET”.

Want to see leetspeak for yourself? Google offers a rather amusing leet version of its search engine. Here, the button “I am feeling lucky” is changed to “EyE Am ph33|1n6 |u(ky”. It also allows users to search for “Images” and “Videos”. In Google’s leet version, these buttons are called “Im4635” and “v1D302”.

Ori­gin­ally, the advantage of the notation was that filter systems could no longer detect banned words. Initiated users could com­mu­nic­ate in their own code without word filters un­der­stand­ing the content. Although it takes a while to get used to, leetspeak can be quickly un­der­stood by people, while it’s often illegible for machines.

Pre­vi­ously, leetspeak was used mainly by hackers, coders, scripters, and pro­gram­mers. The informal internet language has since reached broad swathes of society through the gaming scene. Its use today is largely ironic. Leetspeak is es­pe­cially popular for per­son­al­ising online nicknames in forums or mul­ti­play­er online games. Various forms of leetspeak have emerged over the years. Some forms only use numbers and letters, while others use all sorts of special char­ac­ters.

Although there are some form­al­ised grammar rules in leetspeak, users ul­ti­mately have a lot of scope for in­di­vidu­al ways of writing. Each letter of the alphabet has a whole host of coun­ter­parts in the form of numbers or special char­ac­ters. Try it out for yourself: