Leet Speak 1337

Leet (or 1337 or l33t5p34k) is a language developed with the advent of the Internet, composed of ASCII characters graphically similar to the usual alphanumeric characters.

The term leet speak comes from elite speak which oppose those who do not understand the language, the neophytes (noobs).

The Leet Speak language consists of replacing the common characters (letters A-Z and sometimes digits 0-9) by others having a similar writing. The leet writing is therefore not unique and there are more or less complex variants for each character.

In its most basic version, the leet replaces at least the letter E by the number 3, the letter O by the number 0, the letters I and L by the number 1, the letter S by the number 5 and the letter T by the number 7.

Example: LEET therefore translates to 1337

In its advanced version, the leet offers character combinations for a single letter. Here is a 1337 leetspeak alphabet (not exhaustive)

Example: DCODE can be written in 1337 as : |) [ <> |) 3 or |> < 0 |> €

Reading is tedious, identify potential usual patterns of symbols and deduct the others. In the case where there is no separator, clearly identify the beginnings and ends of each word.

The ciphered message has few alphabetic characters and lots of |_\[]031{} etc.

The number 1337 is a big clue, the presence of terms mixing letters and numbers like h4ck1ng (hacking) or g33k (geek) are clues.

On one hand, the Leet Speak introduces ambiguous symbols (1 = I or L) and ont he other hand, it exists variants like HexSpeak which uses only hexadecimal characters 0123456789ABCDEF, it also exist a variant of que 90 degree leet speak (LSPK90CW).

Originally R is written |2, and Z is written 2, but Z is rare, confusions are few and the use of 2 has spread to R.

Sometimes the message is not only modified, some vocabulary are used :

Example: y00 => yoo => you

Example: teh => the

Example: pwn3d => owned

Start of the 1980's