

Leetspeak is especially popular for personalizing online nicknames in forums or multiplayer online games.

The informal internet language has since reached broad swathes of society through the gaming scene. Previously, leetspeak was used mainly by hackers, coders, scripters, and programmers. Although it takes a while to get used to, leetspeak can be quickly understood by people, while it’s often illegible for machines.
2 in leet speek code#
Initiated users could communicate in their own code without word filters understanding the content. Originally, the advantage of the notation was that filter systems could no longer detect banned words. In Google’s leet version, these buttons are called “Im4635” and “v1D302”. It also allows users to search for “Images” and “Videos”. Here, the button “I am feeling lucky” is changed to “EyE Am ph33|1n6 |u(ky”. Want to see leetspeak for yourself? Google offers a rather amusing leet version of its search engine. Filters were able to easily detect and block banned words like “hacker” or “ass”, but they had difficulty identifying “H4x0r” or what about the numbers 1337? If each of the numbers were mirrored along the vertical axis, you could easily imagine reading the word “LEET”. To circumvent the filters, users developed leetspeak by replacing letters with similar-looking numbers and characters. However, the “elite” of internet users – comprising programmers and coders – were interested in discussing these exact topics. For example, if users in chat rooms wrote about “hacking” or “cracking”, the filters would block the content. On early messaging boards, filters were often used by administrators in order to ban the use of certain words. The spelling using double “e” can be seen as a parody of the word by the creators of leetspeak. To differentiate themselves from other internet users, the “leet” notation caught on as an abbreviation and distortion of the word “ elite”. The tradition of assigning elite status to particularly active and experienced internet users was adopted by programmers, coders, and hackers with a certain degree of humor. Users with elite status had access to all board features. What a user could do on a board, which chat rooms they could access and whether they could share files largely depended on their status. The users of these bulletin boards received user rights depending on their activities. Users could exchange files in some areas, communicate via chat in others, and read public entries, messages or posts in news sections. These early websites were divided into certain sections. Even in the early days of the internet, users often communicated with each other on message and bulletin boards.
