Talk:Leet

Missing image
Cscr-featured.png
Featured article star

Leet is a featured article, which means it has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. If you see a way this page can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, feel free to contribute.

The real backstory of how leet came to be

While I appreciate the large entry on "Leet", I do not feel that the actual history of how "leet" evolved is explained very well. There is more reason and explanation than gaming and reasons that should really be appreciated more than mocked. It actually has nothing to do with gaming until it was adopted by gamers more recently. I do not know if it is out of line to post this here, but I think my article that was published in 2002 in 2600 magazine gives it proper respect while still maintaining the humor and modern day use.

This is my article from 2600 (I release all of my articles under a creative commons license so there are no copyright issues) that I feel explains some of the history that was omitted here.

http://www.docdroppers.org/wiki/index.php?title=A_history_of_31337sp34k

-StankDawg

Best. Comment. Evar

"Leetspeak is however, extremely common in "gamr" groups in high schools. It is used for emphasis and is often considered "hot," or cool. It has simply become the gangsta-style black slang-to-the-izzo of the white/Asian-dominated gamr communiteh."

So much humour packed into that. Not very encyclopedic (my wiki gland was commanding me to edit it at first), but it's got to stay, surely? Sockatume, Talk 03:39, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Funny, i always thought leet ,,..,, for lit, like a person who has achieved (technical) enlightnment. Though surely someone like that could be considered as being from an elite. :)

Might want to included students/schools (or parents) along with employees/companies - a lot of leet are kids, after all, and they more often have to contend with censorware. Also, what about the multitude of abbreviations, from "a/s/l?" to the old standbys, LOL, ROTFL, BTW, etc... -- April

I wouldn't class LOL, BTW, etc as part of leet, they're standard net abbreviations, along with emoticons. AOL has helpfiles explaining them. I might put a list of the standard ways to represent letters. I saw somewhere there's a Windows keyboard definition file that does leet. /\/\3 15 7h3 1337! ;-) -- Tarquin

j00 5|_|x><0|25, 7|2|_||_'/ |_||\||_337. \/\/3r|} there j00 go l33tness at its most l33t.

You suckers, truly unleet. Werd(,) there you go(,) leetness at its most leet.

this being an encyclopedia, please give a translation of the above before it goes back in the article! -- Tarquin 19:04 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)

This article has been cited by Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030110.html)! w00t! - Montréalais

Cool! sorry. I mean |<3\/\/1!! -- Tarquin 17:14 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC) ( 74®qu1|\| )

I would say r for are or possibly our, u for you, and 2 for to and too belong to "AOL speak" and general Internet chat shorthand, not the more often than not wannabee l33tsp34k.

Is the exclamation point really part of the name? If so, the article title should be changed accordingly. -- Zoe

No, it's not -- Tarquin 13:29 Mar 3, 2003 (UTC) ( 74rqu1|\| )

The article suggest the term leet originated in 1980s but I can't seem to find any evidence of pre-1990 usage, does anyone know of any ?

Journey's album "Escape"' cover is written E5C4P3 , does that help? Rhymeless 22:59, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

No, It doesn't I would not consider that as an example.

BTW, I change your comment SYSS Mouse 20:49, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

1 r 1337

3'/3 4r3 73h l337 /\/|/\/j4

all your bases are belong to us...

4LL j00r B4§3$ r B3L0/\/g +\/\/0 |_|§. . .

l337 15 5uk1n9 b4115,

"root" for adminstrator privileges (from the Unix administrator account)

That's not l33t at all. Taw 18:49 Apr 25, 2003 (UTC)

but to access someone elses root privaledges w/o their permission is very l337. w0()t

All i got to say is your all nerds.-UnknownDefiler

4LL 3'/3 G()t 7\/\/0 §4y |$t, j00 4r3 73|-| G4'/.

I had always thought the term "woot" came from a game where when you got an invincibility powerup, the game made a sound that sounded kinda like "woot!". So when people got it, they'd say the word "Woot" on chat, as a way of telling people about it. That just evolved into the general "woohoo" meaning that it has now. None of this is verified, and n00b that I am, I don't even know what game it was. If anybody can back me up on this, might as well throw it in. Etaoin 02:30, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Yes, it's Quake, but that's only a theory. There are also theories of origination of woot from Latin and Daffy duck; for more information, look at our very own Wikipedia entry woot.

Znode Productions 09:27, 2004 Jan 1 (UTC)

There's some pretty specious claims on this entry. The whole "it conserves bandwidth!" argument is right next to a mangling of frequently asked questions that takes rather more space and relies on extended ascii that in the dark ages didn't transfer well between platforms or even clients.

Practically, there are very few if any people who ever actually TALKED like that. It would be used for names on some game servers, used for spam sometimes, but never for actual talking. The practical dialects of leet tended to be the pwn, ownz0red, teh, 1337, etc. numbers get used a lot, but mangling of words with |< and /-\ and stuff didn't happen much in my experience. It wasn't ever a hierarchy thing, the upper classes of the game servers I was on looked down on people who did that sort of thing. Formal leet has always been a sort of joke, while casual leet of the 0wnz class gets used mostly because it sounds sort of cool. Written speech loses a lot of its flavor when it's seperated from speech and body language, so people need new ways to spruce things up. That's why this happens.

In my admittedly small experience, it seems that writing "one" after a string of !!!!!111 started as a joke, making fun of people who use such excessive punctuation seriously. I don't know enough on the topic to edit the article, but it's worth mentioning. It could also account for why the "one"s are not rendered in leet themselves.

It more likely comes from 'lamers' releasing the shift key before the 1/! key because they forgot to take their ritalin.

I always thought that "Woot!" was a creative mispelling of "What!", as an expression of surprise. It seems more likely to me than a derivation of "Whew" (an expression of relief), but I don't know the history.

--62.64.202.114 04:25, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

"b4k4^2 or |34|<4^2 for "baka Ni." Ni is the Japanese word for "two", so it is meant to be read as "Baka raised to the second power" or "baka squared" (meaning quite stupid) (see Baka-Ni t-shirt). Note that this is not gramatical Japanese and is not Japanese slang. This term probably originated entirely at megatokyo."

IMO the phrase j00 4r3 l00k|ng ph0r |§t Baka-Ne or you idiot. B4k4^2 is just an online phrase used to insult people

This is incorrect. The term "baka^2" is derived from the anime character Ruri from Nadesico, who often says "baka baaka." This can be interpreted as "baka baka" (saying "baka" twice), or the contraction of "baka bakkari" ([surrounded by] only [idiots]). While no doubt MegaTokyo brought the usage (relatively) mainstream, it's quite clear that it didn't originate there. Other Nadesico influences on MT includes the occational "Naze Nani MegaTokyo" panels, which mimics "Naze Nani Nadesico" from one of the episodes.

Aha! Thanks for the enlightenment. I should have known, lots of things in megatokyo are spoofs on diverse animes. Kim Bruning 17:33, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

l33t

Though this article was very well written, one of the largest mistakes that I found was the meaning of the word "l33t"

the word "l33t" does not mean "leet"

it actually means "Elite"

as in the "l" produces a sound of "El" and "33t" produces "eet" or "ite"

so insted of Eleet, you end up with "Elite"

Sincerely,

Alan

out_snowboarding@hotmail.com

Annoyance value

Don't suppose a bit could be added to this article to say that l33t annoys many people?

(Seriously-- I've seen high school teachers blow their tops when presented with a paper that has l33t in it.)

Berrik

Shouldn't English teachers blow their tops when they see Leet?

I'd like to know if anybody still uses 'leet' for anything other than comedic value?

I don't know about other things, but in Runescape it's still used frequently because of expletives. - mathx314

Teh

Anyone else think the bulk of teh ought to be moved here, and the rest to Wiktionary?

teh is culturally distinct from l33t, at least as I understand it. It doesn't date to the 1980s or early 1990s, and is used by a different group of people. --Delirium 18:25, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)

There's a cultural continuum. Your statement also applies to many things used in here, and "leet" itself isn't defined as being from the 1980s/1990s, it's evolving continuously. --Random|832 11:35, 19 Jun 2004 (UTC)

el1te

First, the first kinda of quasi-elite spelling variation was mixed case. Which usually had vowels as small characters and all others as large: THiS iS eLiTe. The first alternative spelling that I can remember, and I could find by searching usenet by date is el1te (pre 1995). This spelling quickly went into 3l1t3, and then to the over-the-top parody 31373 (in 1995), a phenomena that spread through IRC rather than BBS. Mixed Case was a bigger phenomena, and there was utilities made to convert to Mixed Case. --BernieLomax 18:20, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

brings back memories

Well this certainly brings back memories of my old bbs back in 1988 if memory serves me correctly 133t or 1337 waz c00l. There is (however) something about this article which doesn't have the right feel to it (I'm not sure... maybe it's seeing dictionaries of tryhard phrases as it escaped it's initial variants and moved into the more mainstream.

it is wierd to see essentially an unwritten law written down. . .

History

The only time I've seen leet used other than by patent idiots or ironically was in warez boast files. It fits with hackerish keystroke saving, trying to fit boast messages into non-relocatable code, and trying to find alternative spellings for one's handle that aren't already taken on BBS. Perhaps someone (somefew) can provide a definitive history from archived files. ISTR a few samples in early 2600's but again, mostly ironic. Rich Farmbrough 21:43, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

MegaTokyo

I think we should yank the MegaTokyo section and replace it with a SomethingAwful comment as a lot of the leetspeak and JeffK come from that community -though it may not be known to many MegaTokyo readers since you have to pay to be a member of the SA forums -and you used to have to pay to read them.

-Seconded, although Megatokyo deserves a 1-sentence blurb.

just b/c of l33t master largo, you have to leave the MT referance in there. Really tho, MT is the best example of leet in use IMO.

n00b

"...newbies (which may be written n00bs, possibly from "new one on the block")..."

This is the worst kind of backronym from someone with too much time on their hands. Here follows origin of n00b: newbie -> newb -> noob -> n00b. Not that difficult to swallow. The backronym should be removed unless defended. --Air 17:48, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

DoneMcKay

Cleanup/Featured

Maybe I'm being a bit presumptuous, but it looks like a whole bunch of script kiddies came through here and edited to their hearts content. I've tried to clean up a little bit, but the article needs a lot of work. I feel really bad deleting entire sections of new content, but I almost did it today. this article was probably a lot better off before it got featured because now everyone has (anonymously for the most part) added their little two bits. I added the cleanup tag too. LMK what you think. McKay 21:38, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Adding a photoshopped picture, 1 Isn't necessary, and 2. Doesn't mean this article doesn't need cleanup.

clean-up yes, deltion. maybe not. evne if some1 tosses in their two bit, it may thier two bits that make the buck.

n00b . again

Noob != Nobody. Unless the usage has really changed, which is concievable, but I think is HIGHLY unlikely. Proof? Until I get such, I'm going to say that this is someone trying to introduce a new concept, not show an existing concept (reminder -- Wikipedia is not a place for original research)

Cleanup: Words

The Example Words section contains rambling definitions of Internet Slang, for which we already have an article. We are only illustrating leet usage, not discussing the etymology of woot (Want One Of Those?? urgh).--Air 17:01, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You're right. This article needs a lot of cleanup. Stuff like this. Feel free to take a stab at it. If there's already an entry in Wikipedia, merge the content and keep the link. If something doesn't have an article, make a decision. Be Bold McKay

Test

origin of !!!!111!!111

Doesn't The Gonif deserve recognition for being the 'inventor' of what has become an all too commonly overused practise? The fact that we actually know who invented it should be include. I'm putting it back in until we decide otherwise. HawkeVIPER 01:42, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hmm...the problem with the anecdote is that it is a) completely unverifiable and b) I guess nobody outside of a very small circle of friends will knwo who "The Gonif" is and what the "Adventurer's tavern" is/was. As ist stands, it's just a story about some random BBS user 20 years ago who allegedly typed something, but we don't know his real name, and there is absolutely no way of verifying that any of this is true. So I say we're better off without the anecdote - I won't remove it for the moment as I'd like to hear others' opinions, but in my opinion, it borders on nonsense. -- Ferkelparade π 07:28, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I agree totally with Ferkelparade. There have been several instances of this in the past, along the lines of "I invented the word LOL on such-and-such BBS in 1978". In my opinion, without any evidence or references or they actually detract from the credibility of the article. They come across as implausible vanity additions. As they are almost inherently unprovable (how do you know no one else was using !!!111!!!11 ?) assertions of this sort are damaging and should be removed. --Air 17:27, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

i say you leave the anecdote in, but label it as such, w/ the addendum that, if anyone can prove a verifyable earlier account, then the title ist theirs.

The BBS might have been keeping some kind of log perhaps? We'd have to contact the sysop for the BBS. HawkeVIPER, I take it you know more about this, or would you be willing to track it down? Kim Bruning 12:18, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

http://www.bbsmates.com/ doesn't seem to be helping much here, maybe you'll have more luck (or more luck elsewhere?) Kim Bruning 12:21, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Addendum: even if it can be broven that a user called "The Gonif" typed "!!11!!11" sometime in 1986, there is still no proof whatsoever that nobody before him typed the same thing, and we still don't know anything about Gonif except his 1980s BBS handle. Wouldn't it be sufficient to say that overexclamation dates back to the 1980s BBS era? -- Ferkelparade π 12:27, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Apparently the Gonif's real name was Jeff (http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.18.99/work-9946.html). -Sean Curtin 00:57, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)

j00 r teh n00blerz

[WIP] l33t and uber-l33t

I was impressed that someone has already begun the work on describing l33t, but there are some serious problems, not only with the examples given, but with some of the linguistic terms that have been used. For instance, 'leet' is not a phonetic version of elite (this would be eleet), it is rather an abbreviated form of the phonetic version, however the term "phonetic version" also lacks specification.

I am currently working on a more in-depth description of the term and its associated language use. <crispy.pie>

t3h cr1spmast4h pwnz j00 n00bz!!!1 TEH NEW L33T PAGE WILL B TEH SECHHHS!!!!11ONEHUNDREDANDELEVEN

Pronounciation of '0' in 'x0r' as 'Œ'

I've noticed that hax0r can be pronounced both hacker and hacksor. I'm just wondering if the 'e' and 'o' sounds can be interpolated to prononce hax0r with an 'Œ' sound (in the German language, 'Œ' is written 'Ö', and in some Scandinavian languages, 'Œ' is written 'Ø') so that it is pronounced 'hackœr'.

In old in old-style ASCII graphic character sets, '0' is displayed with a slash through it (this is known as a slashed zero). This slashed zero looks the same as the 'Ø' in some Scandinavian languages which is pronounced 'Œ'. So I'm wondering whether this is coincidental, or if whoever invented 'x0r' was aware that it would look like 'hackør'.

I've not been able to find anything to back up my claim, and it is just a theory, but I have heard someone (who can be considered a hax0r) pronounce 'hax0r' as 'hackœr' (although they did speak in a Northern English accent).

Ae-a 08:43, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Mircosoft

This article seems to have copied some sentences 1:1... http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidtalk.mspx

Reconsider the "Journey" connection

I'm only going by my own anecdotal evidence, but some one here had brought up the Journey album cover of "Escape" ( E5C4P3 ), which was a very popular cultural reference in the early eighties. That album was released, I think, in late 1981. It sold quite well (and still sells).

I would plead its case as a remote cousin, maybe not a direct precursor of Leet, but being an example of using existing typography to "generate" a synthetic typeface from an existing one. While the group Journey had no need to do so except as artistic statement, I do believe its example was POSSIBLY picked up by numerous computer users who felt a need to "escape" the strictures of ASCII-only "straight" text. I also believe the lineprinter-based "ASCII Art" which depicted Snoopy, Neil Armstrong and so many pinups inspired careful use of the set of displayable characters to "substitute" for the angles, curves and shapes of typography-- hence the more arcane examples of leet you cite late in the article.

In the early "BBS" days, when ASCII was, more often than not, displayed variously on terminals and tv screens in some crude font generic to the display device, there were no universally-adopted ANSI bold/dim, underline, italic, color or other attributes to rely upon; similarly, no set of typefaces like Times or Trebuchet to select from (the fanciest terminals could do these, but nothing but the ASCII characters themselves would make it between users of the BBS system. Indeed, individual communites often had "formatting commands" relevant to the BBS software being run, so you had to be aware of the potential effect of certain character combinations. (Hey, even Wiki has these!)

So your choices of emphasis in writing a missive to friends mostly were:

1. CAPS {often referred to as "shouting"},

2. lowercase,

3. **punctuation**,

4.  +============+
    | separation |
    +============+

5. W H I T E S P A C I N G.

Now, to an extent, there is still some use to be had of these tricks, as "board" software and blog servers sometimes deliberately restrict use of attributes to a small subset of what a user might otherwise embed into a web entry, supposedly to prevent someone from running amuck with HTML and blowing the page into the undisplayable zone. But in the early eighties, you could pretty much assume that whatever was displayed to you or what you could display to others was essentially ONLY what you could type on a Selectric with one available ball. (Of coincidence only: the most popular Selectric ball was called "Elite".)

Other restrictions of computer-communication peculiar to that time were also important: logon names were often limited to eight or so characters, sometimes only rendered in caps, and often no spaces or "normal" punctuation beyond dash or underscore (',/?:;"'\|+={}[]) were allowed in their construction. So, like auto license vanity plates, sometimes you had to be creative to get a logon name that suited. Since real names were an impediment anyway to striking a pose or character of choice, thanks to the anonymity of the modem, users often relied on expressions drawn from fantasy or culture: Bilbo, Falcon, JREwing, paladin-- rather than John Smith, Jenny Brill, etc.

In pre-www(!) days, a collection of LOTS of local and some national BBS services were still far more accessible to the nascent "surfer" generation than the actual internet. ISPs were few and tended to be expensive except in business and grad-level scholastic contexts. An example of a service which attempted to bring the BBS world to "all of us" was U.S. Videotel, which sold a cute little black-and-white video terminal with a built-in modem that dialled directly to the server farm they ran. I am told that this was an attempt to bring the technology of the french post-office-run Minitel network to American consumers. It worked, for a few years, until the Internet and Internet-proxy providers like AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy changed the economics of building a user community and USVideotel folded. It was at USVideotel in 1984 that I first ran into extensive use of StUdLyCaPs by the users-- which I thought were really annoying. (I still do.)

AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, the Source; initially these were, as you'll remember, time-based services. Ten minutes on one, you'd have just spent a buck. The initial come-ons of 50 free hours would expire about the time you had got the hang of the place; then you would begin to realize just how much of a communication junkie you were becoming. Needless to say, Terseness was a virtuous style to adopt.

For those of us with our own computers and terminals and modems, even 300-baud ones, membership in local BBSes was a better deal. Some were even free! Unlike the internet user, who was online with others interacting, most local BBSes were telephonically bound to one user at a time. So you'd log on, get an hour to read and send mail, look at the chess game, make a move, then get logged off when your time expired. So you'd dial another local BBS and hang out there, checking out the messages left since the last time you were there... all like a bumblebee making the rounds and cross-pollenating as you went!

Local BBSes which had interactivity were rare, but available: they tended to be monthly membership-based (to pay for the multiple phone lines into them). This brought about the first "chat rooms". People would drift in and out of them, limited only by the ultimate number of phone lines of the board. One I was a member of ultimately had 72 lines; it was often quite a party there.

Oh, the Journey connection:

Album cover art in general tended to have a more pronounced influence on style back in the days when it was reproduced in the jumbo-size, for LP slipcases. Printed fullscale and wholesale on teeshirts and posters and mirror tiles and surfboards, most rock aficianados knew the covers on sight, even if they'd never listen to the whole record. Modern CD covers do not carry similar totemic power-- they are simply too small to serve as really accessible "art". But the cover of Journey's "Escape" album certainly was one of rock's more identifiable icons of the early eighties.

I remember friends specifically commenting to me on the typographical amusement of E5C4P3 on the cover-- it striking them as a novelty. Though I didn't particularly care about Journey at the time (I find them much better now on the radio than I did then), I had to admire the beautifully-executed cover art and the clever "pun" on fantasy starships and their usually-depicted nomenclature conventions.

I myself was to experiment with this "innovation" on my own keyboard, only to conclude it was not very easy to express anything very useful or accessible-- I decided it was futile and looked like a faulty disk-drive sector had mangled my text.

But I did have to try it-- just as someone else I saw had worked up a tagline using ASCII in another "abnormal" way: "umop apisdn w,i aw dlaH". Stupid ASCII tricks?

Maybe. How you get from there to "suxxors" or "w00t" I do not know. Desire to be perceived as someone in that "elite" group has never possessed me. I've looked at the occasional word like "Pr0n" and wondered if my eyes were crossed. But I do believe that, even if the connection is not direct inspiration by the authors of Leet, an antecedent fossil, "prior art" if you will, IS still there in that Journey album cover.

Just my opinions. Thanks. 08057evalsyttik at oohay dot moc <<don't you just hate spam?>>

Nicely put. So what do you say, folks? Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 03:48, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

AOL ISP=n00b?

This doesn't seem right. The people who use AOL speak usually are users of AIM, but not nessecarily users of the AOL ISP. Maybe I'm just crazy. Phoenix Hacker

"The people who use AOL speak usually are users of AIM, but not nessecarily users of the AOL ISP." Actually, this could be said of many things. The users of of aim are a superset of those who use the AOL ISP. See, the thing is, is that a lot of people use AIM. A LOT. I use AIM. So the people who use AOL will likely use AIM. Some because they don't know what it is their doing and somehow people are just able to talk to them through their UI. The fact of the matter is that AOL=n00b. Because no one in their right mind will pay more than $20 for dialup. (oh, and the non-Internet internet part of AOL, isn't really valuable). And lots of people use AIM. McKay 05:20, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Request for references

Hi, I am working to encourage implementation of the goals of the Wikipedia:Verifiability policy. Part of that is to make sure articles cite their sources. This is particularly important for featured articles, since they are a prominent part of Wikipedia. The Fact and Reference Check Project has more information. Thank you, and please leave me a message (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Taxman&action=edit&section=new) when you have added a few references to the article. - Taxman 20:00, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

???

I think the article needs modification - only n00bs use automated l33t translators.

Retrieved from "https://academickids.com:443/encyclopedia/index.php/Talk:Leet"