{"id":529,"date":"2011-09-27T20:28:25","date_gmt":"2011-09-28T03:28:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=529"},"modified":"2011-09-27T20:58:53","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T03:58:53","slug":"leet-1980-ad-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/27\/leet-1980-ad-usa\/","title":{"rendered":"Leet — ~1980 AD, USA"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

a Leet "B"<\/p><\/div>\n

Leet, also known as “1337” is a writing system developed for the English language which gains some of its value in being difficult to understand — but not too difficult.\u00a0 It is in some respects a code-substitution cipher, where glyphs — especially numbers — are used in place of letters which look similar.\u00a0 For example, “3” is frequently used instead of “E”, “7” in place of “T”, etc.\u00a0 (This makes Thaana<\/a>‘s use of numerals from other writing systems look somewhat less odd.)<\/p>\n

Combinations of glyphs are also substituted for single Latin characters sometimes, e.g. “|<” for “K” or “\/\\\/\\” for “M”.\u00a0 Unusually among writing systems, there is a great abundance of “legal” ways of writing a character.\u00a0 Just a few of the ways to write”M” include “|\\\/|\". \"44\", \"IYI\", \"AA\".<\/code><\/p>\n

Leet is also somewhat logographic, using rebus principles.\u00a0 For example, “banned” can be written “b&”; “great” can be written “gr8”.<\/p>\n

There are number of other “misspellings” and non-standard grammatical forms used to transcribing standard English to Leet in the service of making the communications less understandable.<\/p>\n

Note: I put “USA” down for the country of origin in the title, but that is undoubtedly an over-generalization.\u00a0 Leet developed in the BBS culture, a majority of which probably originated in the US, but Leet is an international ad-hoc collaborative evolutionary endeavour.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leet, also known as “1337” is a writing system developed for the English language which gains some of its value in being difficult to understand — but not too difficult.\u00a0 It is in some respects a code-substitution cipher, where glyphs … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-private-or-secret","category-unknown"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}