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Missing image Leet_Screenshot.png An example of a Leet web browser (Text instead of GUI) in Leet language on a Leet language version of Google Leet (often also Leetspeak, leetspeek, 13375|>33|<, 13375|>34|<, L33t, 1337, |-|4><0R5 or l337) from the phonetic form of the word "elite", is a cipher, or novel form of English spelling. It is characterized by the use of non-alphabet characters to stand for letters bearing a superficial resemblance, and by a number of spelling changes such as the substitution of "z" for final "s" and "x" for "(c)ks". Leetspeak is traditionally used on the Internet and other online communities, such as bulletin board systems. Leetspeak is commonly used by crackers, script kiddies, and gamers. However, leetspeak is not popular amongst all hackers. It is thought that leetspeak has lost some of its eliteness after "everybody" started to use it. It is nonetheless a cultural phenomenon well-known amongst hackers and many other Internet users. Certain factions maintain that "true" leetspeak is spelled correctly, with the exceptions described above. They do not consider the use of extreme short forms (such as "b" for "be", or "u" for "you") as leetspeak; instead, they refer to it by such terms as "AOL speak". This is because they associate such habits with users who use ISPs like AOL, which is associated with "newness". Another convention sometimes associated with leetspeak or Internet chatting is capitalizing every other letter (LiKe ThIs), sometimes called studlycaps or stickycaps. A similar habit involves capitalizing every letter except for vowels (LiKe THiS).
Overview For those who do not normally read or write like +H1$, automatic translators facilitate ciphering and deciphering Leet. The term Leet comes from the word elite. Leet can be either pronounced as "Leet" (monosyllabic, rhymes with "meat", SAMPA /li:t/) or by pronouncing the L separate from the rest of the word ("el eat" (elite)", SAMPA /Eli:t/). Leetspeak is a form of written slang or street talk for the information highway. It is sometimes used to create group identity and to obscure meaning from outsiders, especially newbies (which may be written n00bs). It also establishes a hierarchy, as more complex forms of leet are increasingly unreadable to the untrained eye. Consider the phrase "PHr3Ku3N7ly H4s|{3d K0o£St330nZ!" It translates to "frequently asked questions". Note the extraneous h in front of asked and the construction "-teeonz" as meaning "-tions".). Simple forms of leetspeak have become rather mainstream, as employees use the alternative spellings to circumvent their companies' mail filters designed to censor coarse language and other objectionable content. Leet is also able to disguise text within the object code of a program because it looks very much like binary data when viewed in a text editor. One probable explanation of its origin is from bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the 1980s and early 1990s. It started from the hackers who were trying to participate in spurious activities. Many BBSs didn't want these things happening on their servers, so they would filter or ban people who talked about questionable topics. Most notably the word "hacker" became one of the "naughty" words. Rather than leave to more boring domains, they simply replaced "hacker" with a slightly different variation. ("hack0r", "h4cker", etc.) These got banned too, and then they would change the word more and more until it was barely recognizable. ("h4x0r", "|-|^><()|z") Eventually the system administrators realized that there was no way of banning words in a polymorphic language like Leet. This later turned into the condition where having "elite" status on a BBS allowed a user access to file areas, games, and special chat rooms, often including archives of pirated software, pornography, and text files of dubious quality documenting topics such as how to construct explosives and manufacture illegal drugs. Some people think that leetspeak or hakspek that shortens text may have been developed to decrease bandwidth usage before the bandwidth explosion of the 1990s, but this is most likely not the case, as such methods would have had extremely minimal effect on actual bandwidth usage. Leetspeak is regaining popularity in SMS (Short Message Service) media. More recently, leet has re-entered the mainstream thanks to its use on various popular websites such as blogs, webcomics and forums and its widespread use on IRC. People who enjoy irony sometimes use leetspeak to draw attention to "secrets" they believe no one actually cares about, to joke, or emphasize a nuance. Irony is now the major use of leetspeak on the Internet as an injoke between computer geeks, as genuine usage has steadily declined. Websites exist that are written entirely in leetspeak. There are also converter programs which automatically convert ordinary English text into leet, at varying levels of complexity. Leet is also used by hackers and authors of viruses. The widespread backdoor program Back Orifice used port number 31337 to gain access to unsecured Windows computers. Common letter-to-number or letter-to-symbol translations(subject to a great deal of individual variation):
In recent years, leet has dropped out of style in some communities. Some gamers and Internet users choose not to use it as they consider it to signify weakness and immaturity rather than coolness or of "having skills/sk1LLz". However, many words from leet are now a significant part of modern Internet culture, such as "pwned", the common leet misspellings such as "teh" (73|-|), and especially the "z" at the end of words, such as "skillz". Another prominent example of a surviving leet expression is the ever-popular "woot/w00t". Also, gamers for whom using leet speak seriously is out of style, sometimes use it in an ironic sense. "h42 h42, u ar3z s00 1337" or "ph342 m\/ 1337 sk1llz". Another location for similar text obfuscation is in multiplayer gaming, especially involving other characters from the ASCII set. Some multiplayer games allow for users to be kicked out if they are "being lame" or generally annoying the crowd, by using a simple command like "!kick username" which works fine as long as the username constitutes letters that can be typed with a normal keyboard. To prevent some kicks, people may use names such as "E'li'†è Hàxo'r" which are more difficult to type in. ExamplesWordsFor full definitions please see Internet slang.
Use of x0rNote that the construction "-xor" or any variation thereof can mean not only "-ker" but also "zor" (which is how majority of English speakers would say it). In the phrase "r0x0rz my b0x0rz", which means the object of the phrase (usually a game, program, exploit, etc.) is of high quality, the "x0rz" in "b0x0rz" and "r0x0rz" is pronounced "kszors". It is important to note that while "b0x0rz" appears to be leet for "boxers", it is actually from a common leet expression "r0x0r j00r b0x0rz", "b0x0rz" meaning "computers" (sometimes referred to as boxes, or among system administrators, boxen). "r0x0rz" is generally pronounced as "roks-ors", which is how it is spelled; however, a very small minority pronounce it "rockers", following the usage in "hax0rz". The term "r0x0r j00r b0x0r" itself is probably a derivation from "r0x0r j00r s0x0r" ("rocks your socks"). It should be noted that although the spelling of leet is fairly standardized, pronunciation differs widely, as does the actual alphabet used. Much depends on which forum, newsgroup, or chat room the Leetspeak is being spoken in. An increasingly common use of the "-xor" is changing it's grammatical usage to be deliberately incorrect. Instead of using "Bob r0x0r", "Bob am teh r0x0r" is deliberately to increase the level of irony and to separate it from less-ironic true leetspeak. The origins of this variation are unknown. There are many incarnations of leet, and it is continuously evolving as more people add to it, and thus, a single word can be "spelled" in many different ways. For example, "phonetic" could be |>|-|0n371><, p|-|0|\|3+1|<, |>h0|\|371<, ph0n371k. Phonetic spellings
Note that in true leet, the following are considered improper. They are seen more as IM lingo.
Frequent misspellingsFrequently, common typing errors are also absorbed into leet, such as
Phrases
Over-exclamationAnother common feature of Leet is over-exclamation, where a sentence is postfixed with many exclamation marks: pHu><x0|2z j00 L4yMUr!!!!!!!!!! In some cases, because the exclamation symbol (!) resides on the same key as the number one ("1"), over-exclamation can be accidentally typed with extraneous digits, owing to the excitement of the typist: y0 d00d th1s 5h1zZ47 R0Xx0rzZ!!!!!11 The first known usage of the "!!111!!111!" was by The Gonif on the Adventurers' Tavern BBS in about the 1986 timeframe. He was satirizing the growing number of "new warez kids" who would become overly excited when acquiring new software, and in their excitement could barely type properly. Additionally, the adjacent ~ (tilde) and @ keys may be used in this fashion: t3h leik this OwNz!!11!?!??!@!!????//1!!~~ Some users have adopted this and include it deliberately. A growing phenomenon is deliberately typing the word "one": pwnz0r3d!!!!!11oneoneone. In some cases, this has been purposely exaggerated for comic or ub3r-L33+ effect, i.e. L0l!!!11!eleventy-one1!1!11one1. It can also be used to poke fun at users of AOL speak, and other "lesser" cultures. Note that letter-to-number translations tend not to occur within these "oneoneone" blocks. Another example of accidental mispelling may also be used in this manner, such as "omg!!11oneoneelven", where elven is the mispelling of eleven. MegatokyoThe webcomic MegaTokyo has caused a popularization of leet through the character Largo, who is fluent in leet, and the use of leet on some of the characters' clothing. Even Boo, the hamster of Baldur's Gate fame, can squeak in leetspeak. Some of the phrases are regularly quoted by fans of the webcomic in many forums, chats and multiplayer games, like "ph34r my l33t skillz" ("fear my elite skills"). Leet as a spoken languageNot much thought is given to leet as a spoken language, for reasons relating to its origins as a sort of evolved form of internet cipher. While Leet can be pronounced, it rarely occurs outside the mediums of multiplayer online gaming and IRC. It is not known whether this is because Leet, very uncommonly heard by the human ear outside of individual words which have made their way into the vernacular and slang of our time ("pwned", "roxxed," "haxxor", etc.), produces an unfamiliar and awkward sound for both the speaker and the listener, or whether it is because, for the same reason that abbreviations and ciphers are usually omitted from everyday speech, spoken Leet often takes more time to pronounce and articulate than the original sentence. There may be people who speak almost entirely in the Leet language with words pronounced as they would be spelled in written Leet, but the only such individuals we know about are fictional (see "Largo", Megatokyo) in media where there is no spoken word (in this case, a comic). It is commonly said (in jest) that if leet speakers met and attempted to communicate by speech, they would have to communicate through subtitles. Leetspeak is however, extremely common in high school gamer groups, especially in those who frequently play LAN/online games such as Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Quake, and others. Often, those with a reasonable amount of playing experience in any of these games will make fun of "n00bs" by using Leet to imitate them. Rarely, With the introduction of such applications as teamspeak and general real life meeting of framiliar gamers, some have been known to pronounce the more common terms such as "pwn" (pawn, pown, poon), "own", and "noob" (nub, noob, newb). Leet in videogamingAnarchy OnlineA "Leet" is also the name of a furry, cuddly creature in the online massively multiplayer role playing game, Anarchy Online. Leets are cuddly, speak in leet speak, and, within the game's story, are considered a nuisance. The names of the various kinds of leets found in the game world play on leet, with progressively stronger leets named Leet, Eleet, Leetas, Soleet, Phear Leet and Supa Leet, in addition to special unique leets named Joo and Ownz. Their cuteness has in many ways made them a mascot for the game, with calls for plush leet dolls being common, and a special set of leet pets being the pre-order gift for Alien Invasion, Anarchy Online's third expansion. Pocket KingdomsN-Gage MMORPG Pocket Kingdom: 0wn the W0rld makes heavy use of Leet and gamer slang in its NPC dialogue to comedic effect. .hack (Dot Hack)The anime, video game, manga and book series .hack has a character named Sora who, in the original Japanese versions of the various media, added sound effects and assorted strange phrases to his regular speech, which resulted in a problem for the translators of the fourth video game, in which he was a playable character. So, his speech was instead translated to Leet, the closest English equivalent. Alien HominidAlien Hominid is the debut console video game from the popular flash animation site, Newgrounds, originally created by Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin. The game has a mini-game titled "Super Soviet Missile Mastar" in which you control a Russian nuclear weapon. You control up and down, dodging obstacles in your path, and when you reach the end of the level you nuke the United States. Upon doing so, a character from the game pops up bobbing up and down, and the leet word "PWNED" flashes on the screen. See also
Examples of leetspeekExternal links
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