1337 is a modified version of the phonetic alphabet that uses
non-letter charachters to represent letters in the alphabet. An
example being in the name of the language itself. The number
one representing an L, the threes representing the letter E, and
finally a 7 representing a T. Because of this the language could
be considered a substitution cipher. The 1337 language plays on
the similarity of certian characters to real phonetic letters and
will often have modified spelling of words based on the way
something sounds when spoken. For example the word "Hacks"
is often written as "Hax" or "You" is written as "Joo". And,
yet again, even the name itself is a play on a word. The name
"Leet" is actualy a play on the word Elite.
1337 is often assosiated with the sterotypical nerds and geeks,
and this isn't all untrue. The language was created by the
population of early internet users, and more often than not the
type of people involved in such activties, and did it on a daily or
frequent basis, were the sort of "Nerd" types who would play the
early online videogames and make posts on blogs and bulletin
boards systems. The name came around because having an
"Elite" status on a BBS gave the user access to games, file
folders, and special chat rooms. This often meant the person was
a respected member of the website and to get there they followed
the rules of the site and were shown to be sort of leaders. Often
one of the rules on these sites was no foul language or questionable
content. Many sites had a filter that would block or flag such words,
so the theory is that to get around this, people started using special
characters to spell words in attempt to get around the filtering
systems. This broke way into the 1337 language of creatively
mispelling words, using special characters, and using pictues
to speak.
Depening on how sophisticated you plan on being and or
how good the filter is on the website you're using, you might
want different levels of 1337. Levels range from only using
numbers for some letters to a few numbers and certian special
charachters to completely special charachters. Here are a few
examples of the different levels with the word "Characters".
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
| 4 | 8 | ( | [) | 3 | |= | 6 | |-| | | | _/ | |< | 1 | /\/\ | /\/ | 0 | |> | 9 | |2 | 5 | 7 | |_| | \/ | \/\/ | >< | '/ | 2 |
| /-\ | |3 | [ | |] | & | ]= | 9 | }{ | ! | ] | |{ | |_ | |\/| | |\| | () | |* | <| | |^ | $ | + | (_) | √ | \^/ | * | ¥ | 7_ |
| 4/\/\ 7|-|3 |_|83|2 |-|4><0|2 /\/0\/4! 1473|2 /\/0085!
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