What is Leet ("1337"), A.K.A. Eleet or Leetspeak

Do you sometime see a word written in the combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols even sometimes it doesn't have any single letter, like \/\/0|2|) on an online community, especially in an online gaming? Do you know what are the reasons why some people write a sentence or text in that way? When you see a word like that, mostly when you're using computer, it is a text written in Leet used by some online gamers, script kiddies, hackers, and some individuals such as adults. Leet or "1337", also known as eleet or leetspeak was originated as an encrypted or encoded text of a hacker. Maybe the words or sentence that these hackers want to encode was too complicated. It is mostly used for English language, but can also be used for other languages including Filipino or Tagalog.

One of many ways to write the title “Filipino ‘White Hat’ Hacker” in Leet or 1337.

Most people who have Leetspeaking are online gamers, specially the game's cheaters. But they don't know what is its real use for. They don't really care why they've using it! But the cause why they've doing it, is because it's just their practice and they just wanted it. There are also script kiddies who often uses Leet, just to show to the people who will going to read their message or comment, that they're a hacker. But in reality, they're not hackers but a skiddie. It is also used by some individuals just to hide a sensitive text which not good in the sight of a child, for those who has no capacity to guess what does they mean, such as @$$ and I'm pretty sure that you can guess that 1337 word if you're an adult. And last, the hackers who were originally used Leet! They still sometime use it to avoid search engines from catching the keywords of their public websites and public groups' news with their complicated message, comment, or announcement. But still, any other people can use Leet depend on their reason why they want it to use.

So, if you think that search engines can grasp all the keywords on a website and web pages that accessible by search engines, then you're now mistaken. Because some individuals encoded their text using Leetspeak, and the search engines would now unable to grasp the words with symbols therein their text. For example, in the title "Servant" that translated in leet as 53|2\/4|\|+, search engines has no capacity to grasp that word as a keyword. They may catch those number 53, 2, and 4 but the symbols therein the word may not! But there are many Leet words that can be read by search engines including 1337, w0rd, and j00 because a word with the combinations of letters and numbers can grasp by many search engines. In fact those words are already familiar unto them, that's why they can read them and those 1337 words are already recorded in there databases. The prove are they're showing results with those 1337 words! Therefore, there are two types of Leet, the one is just a combination of letters and numbers which are readable by search engines. And the other one is encoded with a lot of symbols, so they couldn't read it. My next blog post is going to teach you how to write and read 1337!