L33t Speak

I was browsing through ReCom, killing time, when I came across a thread on l33t speak and I got interested.

*You can stop yelling “NOOB” now. Everyone needs to learn at one point or another kay*

Just in case you’re like me, l33t speak is pronounced leet speak. L33t is derived from the word elite.

Wikipedia defines it thus:

Leet (or “1337″), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is an alternative alphabet for the English language that is used primarily on the Internet. It uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. For example, leet spellings of the word leet include 1337 and l33t; eleet may be spelled 31337 or 3l33t.

Because Mr Wiki can be so boring sometimes, you might want to read from Urban Dictionary. =P

And this is what the alphabets that you and I use daily look like in l33t speak (also from Wikipedia ) :

Yes, it’s confusing. The way I see it, they are mostly representations of how the alphabets look or sound like.

Let’s say you want to write:

The author of this blog is awesome

In l33t speak, it’ll look something like this:

7|-|3 4U7|-|0R 0Ph 7|-|15 bL09 15 4\/\/350/\/\3

The only clearly comprehensible word it that sentence is bL09 because it looks like its English counterpart, blog.

Frankly, I think I wouldn’t be able to stand reading words like that for more than two minutes. And I wouldn’t even want to write anything in l33t, even if it makes cryptic messages more awesome. Why? Because I’d be too lazy to figure out what each letter (and word) should look like in l33t.

So no, I didn’t write the above sentence in l33t. I merely used a l33t converter. You can find hundreds of them online. No, it’s not cheating. I’m still a newbie, remember? #excuses

|-|4\/3 PhU|\| 3><P3R1/\/\3|\|71|\|9 \/\/17|-| L337!