![]() ![]() The experienced BBS users had the computing knowledge and hardware to access these games most easily and continued to employ 1337.Īs online gaming improved and computers became more accessible and less technical, 1337 spread to more and more internet users. These early role-playing games often consisted of users sending text to each other. ![]() Online video games were much more primitive then, and many were almost-entirely text-based due to graphical limitations of the time. Elite was modified to leet, then written with numbers as 1337 (1 for L, 3 for E, and 7 for T).ġ337 really started spreading during the late 1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with the rise of the internet and popular computing. Users with elite status on BBSs had the widest access to the system and usually had to be the best hackers in order to achieve that level of access-hence 1337 as slang for “skilled,” in contrast to n00b, or newbie. Someone who pwns another is a pwnzor and the act of doing it pwnage (with -age a favorite suffix of 1337 ).ġ337 itself comes from the word elite. While some misspellings appear intentional like pron, others emerged from accident, like pwn, “to totally defeat someone in a video game,” a typo for own resulting from the fact that the P is right next to the O on QWERTY keyboards. Misspellings-and an overall visual disorientation, as in this example from Tech News, age duz not protek U frm luv bt luv 2 som Xtnt proteks U frm age, or “age does not protect you from love but love to some extent protects you from age”-are a core feature of 1337. A now classic example, pPorn, became p0rn (with a zero for the O), p()rn, or deliberately misspelled as pr0n. As BBS administrators started to crack down on naughty content being shared on their systems, users also began substituting numbers and symbols into words to evade detection and sometimes simply to be different (using 4 for A or 3 for E, as in g4m3). If you want a more complex one, just poke around on the internet - you'll find one!Īlso.did you know, my favorite search engine,, lets you display your search results in leet speak? It's true! Maybe you should check it out sometime.1337, or leetspeak, as a kind of language goes back to the 1980s, when users of computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) would shorten words, e.g., you to u and are to r, for convenience. So I'm just going to put a simple one on this page. There are lots of leet speak translators, or leet speak generators out there. Simple, right? And even if you aren't familiar with leet speak, you can still read it, if you study the text carefully. The letter A could be written as a number 4, and the letter E could be written as a three (backwards E). For example, the letter S could be written either as a dollar sign, or as a number 5. You just take letters in your message and replace them with numbers or symbols that look similar. Well, let me tell you how l33t 5p34k works. Ironically, "newbies" (people new to computer use) started using this code as a way of showing that they were part of the "in" group as well, until now, the tables have been turned, and most serious computer users look on people who use leet speak as being "newbies" or immature. They used this form of writing as a way of showing they were part of the "in" group. The special group was people who were very advanced computer users, message board posters, and gamers. The term 'leet' comes from the word 'elite', which means "part of a special group". Leet Speak (also known as 1337 sp34k) is a code which was common a few years ago, but is quickly losing popularity - something for which I am personally very glad! ![]()
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