H3r3z teh a|2tik1 0|\| 13375p34k

     Does the number 10100111001 have any meaning to you? Do you know what pwnage is? Have you ever told someone you are ROFLMHO? If so, you probably know your leetspeak pretty well. Leet is, essentially, internet slang which people might use for a number of reasons from conveying emotion to typing faster. Leet, or leetspeak, or 1337, or 31337, can also be thought of as a substitution cipher, even though it can vary massively from user to user. Leet is a shortened form of the word elite.

     Anything that makes meanings more obscure works in leet. 10100111001 is the binary for 1337, which in turn is the leet for the word “leet” itself! This is an example of the leet substitution cipher, which uses numbers or symbols for letters. For instance, 4 may mean A, |\/| may mean M, and |2 may mean R. Leet is constantly changing and everyone has their own style of “creative spelling,” so translation is difficult to do with a key. Just read it, and figure it out!

  D00d th!5 64/V\3 iz teh l33t R0xx0rz!!111

     Literally, it means “dude, this game is the leet roxxorz” with both leet and roxxorz meaning awesome or really cool!

     One of the oldest bits of Internet slang is the famous lol. It’s been around since the eighties, and it’s never gone away because it’s just so useful! It means “laughing out loud,” of course, and exists in dozens of forms such as lole, lawls, or if it’s something really funny, lololololololol. It’s been expanded too, into ROFL which means rolling on floor laughing or ROFLMHO, rolling on floor laughing my head off.

     Another piece of leet is “pwn,” a verb which means, more or less, to humiliate or defeat. It is theorized that pwn started as a misspelling of “own” but was adopted with great relish by the internet community. It has morphed, like lol, into many different forms. Some of these include pwnzored - past tense of pwn, pwnzor - someone who pwns, and pwnage - the state of being pwned.

     You can’t really describe leet as a language, dialect, or pidgin. It’s a unique slang, versatile and ever-changing. It has no rules except that some people should be able to understand it, and even then only if you them want to. It’s a great example of language in action and one that is in a constant state of change. Will it endure?—only as long as people keep on using it!

Sources:

“An Explanation of l33t Speak”. bbc.co.uk. Created 16 August 2002. Accessed18 Mar 2009. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A787917>

Dano. “Leet Speak”. The Urban Dictionary. urbandictionary.com. 17 October 2003. Accessed18 Mar 2009. <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=leet+speak>

Picture Source:

Kamshots. “Pavement Texting”. 31 May 2007. Flickr.com. Accessed18 Mar 2009. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/kamshots/523413820>
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