Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings and verbiage used primarily on the Internet for many phonetic languages. It uses some alphabetic characters to replace others in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. Additionally, it modifies certain words based on a system of suffixes and alternative meanings. The leet lexicon includes spellings of the word as 1337 or leet.
Leet originated within bulletin board systems (BBS) in the 1980s, where having "elite" status on a BBS allowed a user access to file folders, games, and special chat rooms. The Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective has been credited with the original coining of the term, in their text-files of that era. One theory is that it was developed to defeat text filters created by BBS or Internet Relay Chat system operators for message boards to discourage the discussion of forbidden topics, like cracking and hacking. Creative misspellings and ASCII-art-derived words were also a way to attempt to indicate one was knowledgeable about the culture of computer users.
Once the reserve of hackers, crackers, and script kiddies, leet has since entered the mainstream. It is now also used to mock newbies, also known colloquially as noobs, or newcomers, on web sites, or in gaming communities. Some consider emoticons and ASCII art, like smiley faces, to be leet, while others maintain that leet consists of only symbolic word encryption. More obscure forms of leet, involving the use of symbol combinations and almost no letters or numbers, continue to be used for its original purpose of encrypted communication. It is also sometimes used as a script language. Variants of leet have been used for censorship purposes for many years; for instance "@$$" (ass) and "$#!+" (shit) are frequently seen to make a word appear censored to the untrained eye but obvious to a person familiar with leet.
Leet symbols, especially the number 1337, are Internet memes that have spilled over into popular culture. Signs that show the numbers "1337" are popular motifs for pictures and shared widely across the Internet.
| Language | Encrypt | Decrypt |
|---|---|---|
| JavaScript | encrypt.js | decrypt.js |
| Python | encrypt.py | decrypt.py |
| Swift | lib.swift | lib.swift |
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