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Funny, i always thought leet ,,..,, for lit, like a person who has achieved (technical) enlightnment. Though surely someone like that could be considered as being from an elite. :)
Might want to included[sic] students/schools (or parents) along with employees/companies - a lot of leet are kids, after all, and they more often have to contend with censorware.
Also, what about the multitude of abbreviations, from "a/s/l?" to the old standbys, LOL, ROTFL, BTW, etc... -- April
I wouldn't class LOL, BTW, etc as part of leet, they're standard net abbreviations, along with emoticons. AOL has helpfiles explaining them. I might put a list of the standard ways to represent letters. I saw somewhere there's a Windows keyboard definition file that does leet. /\/\3 15 7h3 1337! ;-) -- Tarquin
j00 5|_|x><0|25, 7|2|_||_'/ |_||\||_337. \/\/3r|} there j00 go l33tness at its most l33t.
- You suckers, truly unleet. Werd(,) there you go(,) leetness at its most leet.
this being an encyclopedia, please give a translation of the above before it goes back in the article! -- Tarquin 19:04 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)
This article has been cited by Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope! w00t! - Montréalais
- Cool! sorry. I mean |<3\/\/1!! -- Tarquin 17:14 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC) ( 74®qu1|\| )
I would say r for are or possibly our, u for you, and 2 for to and too belong to "AOL speak" and general Internet chat shorthand, not the more often than not wannabee l33tsp34k.
Is the exclamation point really part of the name? If so, the article title should be changed accordingly. -- Zoe
- No, it's not -- Tarquin 13:29 Mar 3, 2003 (UTC) ( 74rqu1|\| )
The article suggest[sic] the term leet originated in 1980s but I can't seem to find any evidence of pre-1990 usage,[sic] does anyone know of any ?
Journey's album "Escape"' cover is written E5C4P3 , does that help? Rhymeless 22:59, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- No, It doesn't I would not consider that as an example.
- BTW, I change your comment SYSS Mouse 20:49, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
1 r 1337
all your bases are belong to us...
l337 15 5uk1n9 b4115,
- "root" for adminstrator privileges (from the Unix administrator account)
That's not l33t at all. Taw 18:49 Apr 25, 2003 (UTC)
All i got to say is your[sic] all nerds.-UnknownDefiler
I had always thought the term "woot" came from a game where when you got an invincibility powerup, the game made a sound that sounded kinda like "woot!". So when people got it, they'd say the word "Woot" on chat, as a way of telling people about it. That just evolved into the general "woohoo" meaning that it has now. None of this is verified, and n00b that I am, I don't even know what game it was. If anybody can back me up on this, might as well throw it in. Etaoin 02:30, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Yes, it's Quake, but that's only a theory. There are also theories of origination of woot from Latin and Daffy duck; for more information, look at our very own Wikipedia entry woot.
Znode Productions 09:27, 2004 Jan 1 (UTC)
There's some pretty specious claims on this entry. The whole "it conserves bandwidth!" argument is right next to a mangling of frequently asked questions that takes rather more space and relies on extended ascii that in the dark ages didn't transfer well between platforms or even clients.
Practically, there are very few if any people who ever actually TALKED like that. It would be used for names on some game servers, used for spam sometimes, but never for actual talking. The practical dialects of leet tended to be the pwn, ownz0red, teh, 1337, etc. numbers get used a lot, but mangling of words with |< and /-\ and stuff didn't happen much in my experience. It wasn't ever a hierarchy thing, the upper classes of the game servers I was on looked down on people who did that sort of thing. Formal leet has always been a sort of joke, while casual leet of the 0wnz class gets used mostly because it sounds sort of cool. Written speech loses a lot of its flavor when it's seperated[sic] from speech and body language, so people need new ways to spruce things up. That's why this happens.
In my admittedly small experience, it seems that writing "one" after a string of !!!!!111 started as a joke, making fun of people who use such excessive punctuation seriously. I don't know enough on the topic to edit the article, but it's worth mentioning. It could also account for why the "one"s are not rendered in leet themselves.
- It more likely comes from 'lamers' releasing the shift key before the 1/! key because they forgot to take their ritalin.
I always thought that "Woot!" was a creative mispelling[sic] of "What!", as an expression of surprise. It seems more likely to me than a derivation of "Whew" (an expression of relief), but I don't know the history.
--62.64.202.114 04:25, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)
"b4k4^2 or |34|<4^2 for "baka Ni." Ni is the Japanese word for "two", so it is meant to be read as "Baka raised to the second power" or "baka squared" (meaning quite stupid) (see Baka-Ni t-shirt). Note that this is not gramatical[sic] Japanese and is not Japanese slang. This term probably originated entirely at megatokyo."
- This is incorrect. The term "baka^2" is derived from the anime character Ruri from Nadesico, who often says "baka baaka." This can be interpreted as "baka baka" (saying "baka" twice), or the contraction of "baka bakkari" ([surrounded by] only [idiots]). While no doubt MegaTokyo brought the usage (relatively) mainstream, it's quite clear that it didn't originate there. Other Nadesico influences on MT includes the occational "Naze Nani MegaTokyo" panels, which mimics "Naze Nani Nadesico" from one of the episodes.
- Aha! Thanks for the enlightenment. I should have known, lots of things in megatokyo are spoofs on diverse animes. Kim Bruning 17:33, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)
l33t
Though this article was very well written, one of the largest mistakes that I found was the meaning of the word "l33t"
the word "l33t" does not mean "leet"
it actually means "Elite"
as in the "l" produces a sound of "El" and "33t" produces "eet" or "ite"
so insted of Eleet, you end up with "Elite"
Sincerely,
Alan
Annoyance value
Don't suppose a bit could be added to this article to say that l33t annoys many people?
(Seriously-- I've seen high school teachers blow their tops when presented with a paper that has l33t in it.)
Shouldn't English teachers blow their tops when they see Leet?
I'd like to know if anybody still uses 'leet' for anything other than comedic value?
Teh
Anyone else think the bulk of teh ought to be moved here, and the rest to Wiktionary?
- teh is culturally distinct from l33t, at least as I understand it. It doesn't date to the 1980s or early 1990s, and is used by a different group of people. --Delirium 18:25, Jun 17, 2004 (UTC)
el1te
First, the first kinda of quasi-elite spelling variation was mixed case. Which usually had vowels as small characters and all others as large: THiS iS eLiTe. The first alternative spelling that I can remember, and I could find by searching usenet by date is el1te (pre 1995). This spelling quickly went into 3l1t3, and then to the over-the-top parody 31373 (in 1995), a phenomena[sic] that spread through IRC rather than BBS. Mixed Case was a bigger phenomena[sic], and there was[sic] utilities made to convert to Mixed Case. --BernieLomax 18:20, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
brings back memories
Well this certainly brings back memories of my old bbs back in 1988 if memory serves me correctly 133t or 1337 waz c00l. There is (however) something about this article which doesn't have the right feel to it (I'm not sure... maybe it's seeing dictionaries of tryhard phrases as it escaped it's[sic] initial variants and moved into the more mainstream.
History
The only time I've seen leet used other than by patent idiots or ironically was in warez boast files. It fits with hackerish keystroke saving, trying to fit boast messages into non-relocatable code, and trying to find alternative spellings for one's handle that aren't already taken on BBS. Perhaps someone (somefew) can provide a definitive history from archived files. ISTR a few samples in early 2600's but again, mostly ironic. Rich Farmbrough 21:43, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
MegaTokyo
I think we should yank the MegaTokyo section and replace it with a SomethingAwful comment as a lot of the leetspeak and JeffK come from that community -though it may not be known to many MegaTokyo readers since you have to pay to be a member of the SA forums -and you used to have to pay to read them.
-Seconded, although Megatokyo deserves a 1-sentence blurb.
n00b
"...newbies (which may be written n00bs, possibly from "new one on the block")..."
This is the worst kind of backronym from someone with too much time on their hands. Here follows origin of n00b: newbie -> newb -> noob -> n00b. Not that difficult to swallow. The backronym should be removed unless defended. --Air 17:48, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- DoneMcKay
Cleanup/Featured
Maybe I'm being a bit presumptuous, but it looks like a whole bunch of script kiddies came through here and edited to their hearts[sic] content. I've tried to clean up a little bit, but the article needs a lot of work. I feel really bad deleting entire sections of new content, but I almost did it today. this article was probably a lot better off before it got featured because now everyone has (anonymously for the most part) added their little two bits. I added the cleanup tag too. LMK what you think. McKay 21:38, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- Adding a photoshopped picture, 1 Isn't necessary, and 2. Doesn't mean this article doesn't need cleanup.
n00b . again
Noob != Nobody. Unless the usage has really changed, which is concievable, but I think is HIGHLY unlikely. Proof? Until I get such, I'm going to say that this is someone trying to introduce a new concept, not show an existing concept (reminder -- Wikipedia is not a place for original research)
Cleanup: Words
The Example Words section contains rambling definitions of Internet Slang, for which we already have an article. We are only illustrating leet usage, not discussing the etymology of woot (Want One Of Those?? urgh).--Air 17:01, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- You're right. This article needs a lot of cleanup. Stuff like this. Feel free to take a stab at it. If there's already an entry in Wikipedia, merge the content and keep the link. If something doesn't have an article, make a decision. Be Bold McKay