In recent months I’ve been seeing a lot of “l337” on the web. What’s l337, you ask? Good question. As far as I had been able to surmise, it was an exceedingly obnoxious form of slang which was often used by wannabe kewelie hacker warez phreakz (henceforth known as “hax0rs”). A hax0r and an actual hacker are quite different from one another – namely, a hax0r fancies himself to be a super-savvy uber-hacker, when in reality they probably don’t even know what their own ISP number is. Also, an actual hacker is unlikely to use l337 to show how k00lz they are.

A common sentence written in l337 might read like this:

y0 |)u|)3s, n37n4(s !s r34LLy (00L, 73LL 4LL y0ur phr!3n|)s!

(Or “Yo dudes, NetNacs is really cool, tell all your friends!” in English.) 

Half of the time, l337 (“leet” in English. And no, I have no idea why it’s called that.) would render sentences unreadable, so I had to know: 

How on earth do you figure out what l337 people are saying? 

And so my quest began. The first real “l337-to-English” page I found (http://www.geocities.com/dailyanime/L337.html)  had me quite worried. According to the chart of “hardcore l337”, it would take about 10 minutes to type a simple sentence using l337: 

5|o0|\|63 |30|3 50,|_|@|)\3|o@|\|75 !5 (007!

(translation: “SpongeBob Squarepants is cool!”) 

Never mind how long it would take just to figure out what in the !#$% (non-l337 slang for “bleep”) they’re supposed to be saying. Thankfully, hardcore l337 seems to be rare (gee, I wonder why) – and the next page I found was a “lite” l337 javascript translator (http://www.arches.uga.edu/~spahzz/l33t%20translater.html). So if you’ve ever had the burning urge to include the phrase “K34nu R33V3s !s (00L (Keanu Reeves is cool)!” in your next newsgroup post, you can do it with ease.  

Just don’t blame me if it makes everyone else want to gouge their eyes out with a pencil. 

P4r7y 0n |)u|)3s! (Party on dudes!)