Leet

Pic by Glutnix

Ar3 you l33sp3ak profici3nt?

While playing on twitter I found an interesting link for an electronic translator, but not just any translator… a translator that converts typed English into leet.

Quick definition of leet: an alphabet used primarily on the Internet, which uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters; also called Leetspeak, L33t.

Some people love leet and text in nothing but. Others hate it and see it as the beginning of the end for proper written English. I think leet is just fun.

So far, I’ve yet to see translation requests for it (read that with a chuckle), but you never know what the future might bring. I’m sure when words like ‘OK‘, ‘humongous‘, and the verb ‘to google‘ first entered our speech no one ever thought they would show up in any respectable dictionary.

Anyway, whether you need to understand your text messages better, believe the whole English-speaking world will go leet one day, or (like me) you just get a kick out of anything speech related, here’s the link. Translate away.

H4v3 ĵn!

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