Leet Lingo

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"Leet speak" is a form of writing which replaces letters with numbers or symbols that look similar; for example, 1337 translates as "leet", which means "elite."

Leet may use slash marks to make letters, like |\|=n, |\/|=m, and \/\/=w.

Sometimes people combine chat speak with 1337 $p33k. Chatspeak should not be confused with leet speak; chatspeak consists of abbreviations, like "lol" "rotfl" "lmao" or "lmfao," all of which indicate laughter.

Leetspeak and especially Chatspeak often omit punctuation and capitalization. Originally this was for speed or for convenience in typing on handhelds, but now it is done for parody.

Intentional misspellings like "teh" (the) and "pwn" (own, i.e. defeat) are also common, as are substitutions of "x" for "ks" or "z" for "s" and the "or" suffix/infix, which can be silent ("haxxorz" can mean "hacks" or "hackers"). Also, you should always switch "f" with "ph" (phreak) and the reverse (fone) at the beginning of a word. And most of all, leetspeak should never be consistent. Different numbers/symbols should be substituted for the same letter with a single sentence, or even within a single word. The more random it seems, the better.

See also Letters 2 Numbers, Future Slang, and Techno Babble.

3X4MPL3Z (Examples):

4|\|1|\/|3 4|\|d |\/|4|\|94 (Anime and Manga)

• In Lucky Star Konata's friends are slightly puzzled that she doesn't ever talk that way in real life...but when she shows them what her chat logs look like they can barely recognize it as Japanese.
  • There's also this "gatongo" person in Konata's friend list that fills his/her chat log with "wwww" (which is the Japanese equivalent of "lolololol").
    • Enhanced in translation by certain fansub group: "roflcopterskatesbbq".
• The titular Gantz communicates in this way.
• In Halo Legends (Specifically Toei Animation's "Odd One Out") one of the Spartans is designated "Spartan 1337"
• The 2010 G Gundam manga introduces the JMF1337SD Shading Gundam, a black version of the Shining Gundam. However, this was most likely a coincidence, seeing as the original 1994 anime had the JMF1336R Rising Gundam.
• A mystery Kogoro is tasked to solve in Case Closed revolves around a mysterious text message that is revealed to be the Japanese version of leet.

K0|\/|1C 800X (Comic Books)

• ZOMG! A reference to Nextwave's Tabitha plzkthxbye.

PH4|\| W0RX (Fan Works)

• Eric Lawson has introduced a new character into his Mega Man Fan Verse, an autistic hacker named Schroeder "Latchkey" Dunlap, who uses a relatively mild version of this.
• The Warhammer 40,000 fanfic ToyHammer features a Cogboy of the Adeptus Mechanicus who starts speaking exclusively in l33t after extended exposure to Counter-Strike.
• There are several hackers and crackers who use Leet-based handles in The Secret Return of Alex Mack and The Shared Universe that grew out of it, The Teraverse:
  • When she was a pre- and early teen, Willow Rosenberg used the handle "5al1x680" (salix is the genus for willows, 680 angstroms is the wavelength of a certain shade of red).
  • P$ychon4ut, aka William Robert Halsey, a villainous/psychopathic cracker.
  • Zoe Carter, aka "3UrēK@!", is a specialist in identity theft who becomes one of Ultraman's "white hat" hackers.

L173R47YR3 (Literature)

• In the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Death Star, a character goes by the alias Teh Roxxor.

L1VE 4CT1O|\| TV (Live Action TV)

• Numb3rs uses leetspeak on occasion. Charlie's girlfriend Amita is fluent in leet, often decoding leet passages for Don and his FBI team.
• mun2. Say it in Spanish.

|\/|4CH1|\|1|\/|4 (Machinima)

• Master Chief from the Machinima series Arby 'n' the Chief spends the entire series talking in this fashion.
  • "Mai ROFLcar gos n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n..."
  • He DOES speak 1337, but arguably often he just flat out misspells words, at times for a joke.
• The character Player from the Machinima series Leet World seems to speak pretty much just this, as does Leeroy sometimes. Player differenciates himself from Leeroy in that he actually does not speak literally, using text shown at the bottom of the screen or the Counter-Strike: Source radio commands (naturally, the game used for the machinima), and Leeroy uses it mostly only when speaking of 'World of Battlelore', and is a Geek about it and computers. It is lampshaded by others asking the character Cortez, who is blind, how he can know what Player is saying (he doesn't know how himself). Westheimer has tried to say it himself, likely to trying to be 'on the same level' as Leeroy, as defacto captain of his team.

|\/|49421|\|35 (Magazines)

• Some tabloid newspapers in the UK publish text messages sent to them. These are always written "britney should b left alone". Just how much effort would it be to add that extra "e"?

|\/|U51C (Music)

• This song pretty much defines 1337-5p34k.
• One Demoscene module musician had the artist name Tr/\sh (pronounced "trash").
• All of the tracks on Reanimation.
• Bella Thorne's TTYLXOX is chocked full of this trope.

|\|3\/\/ |\/|3D14 (New Media)

• Image Macros typically use chatspeak captions (partly for comic effect, partly to minimize blocking of the image).
  • The Orlies from Erfworld are a parody of the (in)famous O RLY owl Image Macro. They talk in snippets of chatspeak (e.g. one says "OMGWTFBBQ" as it's roasted by a dwagon).
• And then you get things like LOLCODE, a (working!) programming language based on lolcat-based leetspeak.
  • And then you have the Lolcat Bible. "An Ceiling Cat sayed, I can has lite? An lite wuz".
    • Don't forget the Lolcat Wasteland! "earth in ur winter, covered in snow / can has potato. PO-TA-TO. / INVISIBLE SUMMER! RAININGZES! / im in ur hofgarden, drinking ur coffeez."
• Google now allows you to view their Home Page this way.

V1D30 94|\/|35 (Video Games)

• Kingdom of Loathing ref: You get to kill monsters who do this. With a dictionary, no less. It's almost as satisfying as killing the drunken frat boys a few quests later.
• The Freakshow name themselves in l33tspeak in City of Heroes. Even more disconcerting: some of them apparently speak it aloud. Don't think about that too much.
  • An early mission to defeat a Freakshow gang leader (named "T3h PwNxx0rz") rewards the player with the "Pwnz" badge. Badges can be displayed underneath your name, as sort of a title, so you can see people with that badge walking around like this:

Superhero Name Pwnz

• • Horrifically, there's a story arc in City of Villains that has you defeat a Freakshow Boss, who then gives you a speech in l337 that spans about four or five paragraphs! Your character, thankfully, gets the gist of it but good luck getting through it yourself.
• The L33t Hamm3r Broz. in Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time speak only in leet. This is later parodied after they're freed from Shroob brainwashing ("Who talks like that?").
  • Technically, it's not even real leet. However due to Rule of Funny...
• Sal Manella in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney also speaks 1337. It's pretty funny when Maya tries to figure out what he's saying. "Hey Nick... what does 'suck-sores' mean?"
• The MMORPG Anarchy Online features ratlike creatures called "Leets" who sometimes spout leet-speak.
• Persona3 has "Maya", a player in the MMPORPG that the Main Character plays type out entirely out of this, even though she happens to be his composition teacher in real life.
  • In addition, She has no idea that the protagonist is her MMO partner, and freely confesses that she finds his real life self very attractive.
• In MUGEN programming, one parameter is "airjuggle" defining how many hits may be landed on a falling opponent. Fittingly, Rare Akuma's airjuggle is defined as "1337".
• Assassin's Creed has an amusing example of this. In the sections not played in the Animus, Desmond can gain access to the personal mailboxes of the researchers. While Lucy Stillman, the doctor's assistant, types her mails with perfect grammar and spelling, the arrogant, self-righteous Dr. Vidic's e-mails look like he's text messaging, or like he's almost completely illiterate. Take your pick.
• In the .hack video games, the character Sora speaks in leet online (in the English version). IN the japanese version he spoke in a way that made it near impossible to translate directly.
• Final Fantasy VIII provides an early example; a young boy you meet in Timber speaks partially in chatspeak, with "u" for "you", "2" for "to" and so on.
• In Star Wars: Republic Commando, Scorch will occasionally say "Nobody can match my l33t h4x0r skills!" when hacking a terminal.
  • Despite the fact that Fixer is the slicing specialist of the group.
• In No More Heroes 2, Kimmy Howell says that Travis should read her letter "just for lulz".
• In Do Don Pachi, Hibachi's theme in Daifukkatsu is ]-[|/34<#!, which is "HIBACHI." Yeah...
• Quest for Glory 3 tells the player at one point, "U C D Bs." Then adds, "Killer Bees."
• Yuzu in Devil Survivor uses Leet Lingo in all her mails.
• One of the pre-made Sims in The Sims 3 is a computer nerd called "Cycl0n3 Sw0rd".
• The newscaster in Galactic Civilizations II drops into this for one of the miniaturization upgrades.
• One of the enemies in Bookworm Adventures Vol. 2 speak in this. Unsurprisingly, the team was in a virtual world. The enemy was named Rogue Hacker.
• Perfect Dark includes an unlockable version of the Klobb gun from Golden Eye 1997, renamed the "KL01313". Also, in the Attack Ship level, the information screen for Cassandra de Vries' necklace displays the message "Password: I8MOZYM8NDI8S".

\/\/E8C0|\/|1C2 (Webcomics)

• The "Grammar Nazi" character who occasionally showed up in Queen of Wands is shown here lashing out at a l33tspeak user.
  • 'We do not negotiate with terrorists!'
• There's also a guy in Megatokyo who solely speaks l337 (called, appropriately, "L33t D00d"); Largo is the only person in the strip who can understand him.
  • There's even a claim that l337speak entered the mainstream when he was introduced on strip #9, the most famous strip of the entire comic.
    • The whole scene parodies the "Jive-Talk" scene from the movie Airplane!.
• A mad, tire-stealing caper in RH Junior's Tallyho features a carload of zoo animals, all of whom speak in Leet Speak Internet memes. The impressive thing about this is that a large number of them speak in species-appropriate Internet memes—the owls' first lines of dialogue are "O RLY? YA RLY!", the more feline characters use LOLcats dialogue, and the walrus was convinced to join up when he was promised that he would get his bucket back.
• Misfile had Missi use some in her excitement, followed by an admonishment from Emily here.
• Saturn and his parents from Star Guys only speak in n00b. Considering that they're an 'unusual' family, this isn't really surprising.
• In Sequential Art squirrely "organic procesors" are called #5C4RL37, #V10L37, #4M83R and #J4D3.
• Several of the troll kids from Homestuck speak in either this manner or their own unique spelling patterns. Some of the symbol substitutions:
  • Aradia replaces 'o' with '0' to sh0w her emptiness.
  • Terezi types in all caps and the numbers 4, 1 and 3, TO R3PR3S3NT H3R 1NT3NT1ON4LLY 4NNOY1NG P3RSON4L1TY. (The number 413 is significant in Homestuck).
  • Vriska replaces the letter 'b' and the sound 'ate' with '8', 8ecause she's associ8ed with spiders. When she gets really flustered, she st8ps c8ring a8out wh8re sh8 p8ts 8n the 8s.
  • Sollux replaces 's' with '2' and 'i' with the Roman numeral 'ii' because he ha2 a lii2p.
  • Nepeta replaces 'ee' with '33', to look like a cat emoticon (:33).
  • Equius uses '%' for 'x', and '100' and '001' for 'loo' and 'ool' sounds, because he's themed around the legendary "Man of a Hundred Horses" of Arabic myth.
  • Feferi uses ')(' instead of 'H'.
• Averted in Dan and Mab's Furry Adventure, during one of the author's irregular (and strange) Q&A sessions, where she answers one of the questions her fans email her. One question was in l337, and she couldn't understand it. She did her best... But it certainly led to one of the oddest jazz ensembles ever... Prawn suits and saxophones indeed.
• Schlock Mercenary got a punny/multilingual version as one of Naming Conventions for AI.

\/\/35T3R|\| 4|\|1|\/|4TI0|\| (Western Animation)

• Transformers Animated brings us The Headmaster, and in his wake follows total ownage.
• Sierra from Total Drama World Tour

\/\/E8 0R1G1|\|4l (Web Original)

• The optional subtitles in Arfenhouse: The Movie are mostly rendered in LOLspeak. In Arfenhouse Teh Movie Too, the subtitles aren't optional (though "LOLOLOLOLOL" is spoken as "HA HA HA HA HA").
  • The only exception is the Only Sane Man Joe, whose lines are written in perfect English.
• The Teen Girl Squad has been known to pepper their speech with 1337 haXXorz.

Cheerleader: I just picked up this fashion magazine with MORE HOT TIPS! So And So: w00t! Whats Her Face: w00t! The Ugly One: w00t!

• • The TGS menu page title reads "T33n G1rl Squ4dx0rx!!"
• The Chaos Timeline has its own version: The currency of the German technocracy is the Thaler, abbreviated "Th". Thus, people from this timeline will replace the T's in names of firms considered too greedy with Th. One example is the computer/electronics firm Werstand (imagine a cross between Microsoft, IBM and Siemens), which becomes Wersthand.

R34L L1F3 (Real Life)

• Inserting Leet characters in passwords is actually a very effective yet convenient way of increasing their length and complexity, making them exponentially harder to crack, especially against dictionary attacks. For example, if your password is "Password", changing it to "P4$$\/\/0r|)" puts your password past the length and character range of all but the most persistent hackers, while still maintaining enough visual cues for you to remember that it is merely your intentionally screwed-up way of spelling "Password"
  • This is assuming you can remember your own substitutions.
• If you think about it, the main shtick of Chic-Fil-A is lolcows. Yes, we shall "can eat moar chikn".
  • Oh mai gaw.
• In January 2011, FUNimation tried to sue 1337 Bittorrent users over downloading One Piece, the number no doubt chosen intentionally.
• Wil Wheaton, Paul and Storm, and Adam Savage put on a music and comedy show for geeks called "W00tstock."
• f33733pp33n0uszhs +@hke dh33z3 2 x+r33hmszh, through jejemon.