Over the course of the past decade, a new language has evolved out of the midst without warning or regulation. The existence of this language is due mostly to the booming success of the internet and the spawning a new culture of writers, forum gurus, chatroom butterflies, hackers, and computer gaming connoisseurs. In order to make their typing lives easier, these people decided to come up with a series of acronyms for common phrases such as “Oh my God” (omg) , and “”Be right back” (brb). From there grew the necessity for people to explain their state through additional acronyms, such as “lol” for “laughing out loud”. The hackers amongst this society from there felt it necessary to create their own language in the hopes that others would not understand their “code”. Much to their chagrin, the gamers and chatters discovered this elite language and not only adopted it, but morphed it into the social standard of “coolness” in their online communities.
Henceforth marked the birth of “Leetspeak”: a variation off of the English language understood only by those in tune with the internet universe. You will not find any books or literature on this mysterious lingo, so one can only learn the language through asking around. Now since those who are “in the know” when it comes to “Leetspeak” feel they are superior to all others whilst inside their online castle, one must learn through intense mockery and shame what the words, phrases, and acronyms mean. My job here today is to offer assistance to those who wish to learn the language without the rigors of dealing with immature “leetspeakers”, while offering my commentary on the language.
The reason why it is termed “Leetspeak” is because of the word, “leet”, which is a shortened means of saying one is elite: a term used most commonly used to express how one is superior to another in hacking, playing a particular video game, etc. On the other hand, when a person is considered inexperienced or inferior, they are not labeled a newbie like the rest of normal society would, but rather a “noob”. When a “leet” person is agitated by a “noob”, they will often tell them to “log off” which is taken in real society as “f*** off”. Like any real language, words will change appearance over time, but “Leetspeak” evolves as quickly as the most dangerous of bacterial pathogens. Therefore, the aforementioned words can be found in a variety of disguises, such as: l33t, 1337, newb, n00b, and others I have yet to observe. Even the acronyms for physical expressions advance with time. “Lol” can also be found as “lmao” for “laughing my ass off”, “rofl” for “rolling on the floor laughing” and the ultimate form, “roflmao” which I assume you can figure out means “rolling on the floor laughing my ass off” (which is something I think none of us have actually done).
When one has an online interaction with a “leetspeaker”, they might get the impression they are either dyslexic or a complete imbecile because of the sheer number of typological errors. Since most “leetspeakers” either are idiots or are computer gamers who have to type really quickly to prevent attaining “noob” status, certain words are commonly typed incorrectly. Words such as “the” and “like” are commonly mistyped as “teh” and “liek”. Such errors have been so common in the interweb universe that they are now considered not only commonplace, but “en vogue”. So when someone claims there opponent is “the suck”, they are in fact, “teh suck”. Provided here is a section from the website www.purepwnage.com to illustrate this phenomenon:
“i pwn noobs liek hard rite n my roomate has dis camera rite so hes all liek ‘we can make a show lol’ n im liek dats teh pwnage n stuf n hes liek i no lol so im liek ok film me noob n hes liek ok so we did lololol
thne we lukd at it rite n were liek ‘omfg stfu dats pure pwnage lol’ so we made dis site n stuf rite n now were gonna b famose!!!!
-teh_pwnerer” (If you can’t understand this, consider yourself a normal human being.)
There is one specific typo requires a more in depth investigation as it has spawned a lengthy subseries of jargon. When a hacker has successfully hacked or when a gamer has defeated an opponent in a spectacular fashion such that his opponent is embarrassed, he is considered to have been “owned”. Because of the close marriage of the “o” and “p” keys on the keyboard, these online folk will often accidentally type the word as “pwn”. This has now become the gold standard for owning. Evolution grabbed hold of this by the balls and created “pwn3d” and “pwnt”. In cases of severe and dire owning, other acronyms are attached as prefixes or suffixes to accentuate the damage. Examples include: “omgpwn”, “omfgpwn”, “wtfpwn” (with “wft” meaning “what the f***?”), “pwnbbq” (a term used in video games where an explosion would indicate a barbeque of the opponent), and many other combinations. I saw there was a guild in World of Warcraft named, “OMFGWTFPWNBBQ’. One time I saw the term “fwnt” used. Upon asking the “leetspeaker” what that means, I received the expected response of “it means f***ing pwnt u goddamn n00b!”
I could explain in depth every term and phrase in this bizarre tongue, but by the time I finished writing it would have already evolved. In case it isn’t apparent through my poor use of awkward analogies, I do not think too highly of this language. Honestly I cannot grasp why it is the cool thing to look like you have a 3rd grade education level. After having a conversation with Dave the Game, I agree with how he says it’s incredibly inefficient. Why say “I omfgwtfpwned him” when you easily say “I beat him” combined with other separate words that would really hit the message home that you really owned him? I also don’t understand why the true “l33t” have to be so damned high and mighty about their preciousssssssssssssss language (see, I’m still a nerd). Overall I feel the language is agitating and illogical.
Over time however, I have adopted the language as being hilarious in its fallacies. I really get a kick out of hearing my fellow friends call each other “noobs” in real life, or telling each other to “log off”. Whenever we some unfortunate event happen to some unfortunate soul, my friends will yell out “PWNED!”. So rather than just whine about the lingo, I have come to adopt it and deal with it. Below I have included a miniature lexicon of some of the aforementioned terms plus some I haven’t included. Please share with us any terms I am missing plus any humorous stories you have encountered in your online sojourns.
The Official Leetspeak Lexicon:
Lol: “laughing out loud”
Lmao: “Laughing my ass off”
Omg: “Oh my God”
Omfg: “Oh my f***ing God”
Wtf: “What the f***?”
Stfu: “Shut the f*** up”
Brb: “Be right back”
Afk: “Away from the keyboard”
Pwned, pwn3d: variation off of “own”
Leet, l33t, 1337: elite
Noob, newb, n00b: novice or newbie
teh: the
liek: like
Dats: that’s
Woot, w00t: a means of showing excitement or success
–x0rz: a suffix added to some verbs (honestly I have no clue what it means)
–sauce: a suffix used to turn verbs into nouns, e.g. leetsauce or sucksauce
Ph33r: fear
Meh: me (often combined with “ph33r”)
Dood, d00d: dude
M8: mate
Again, this is but a minor list and I wish for readers to fill in the gaps and add to this lexicon to make it “l33t”. I hope you enjoyed the article and keep it real, d00ds.
~The O
HEFY? “Hot Enough For You?”
This hilarious “zinger” always gets everybody ROFL.
OJIOGBUOLSWMRTJVAIFWNTMITSIHDHGCOAC “O.J. Is Obviously Guilty, But Under Our Legal System We Must Respect The Jury’s Verdict, Although It Frankly Would Not Trouble Me In The Slightest If He Drove His Golf Cart Off A Cliff”
–From Dave Barry in Cyberspace
Leetspeak is not a language. It is, at best, a dialect of English; it uses the same words, vocabulary, word order, grammar (loosely), etc.
Leetspeak is more like the typing equivelent of bad handwriting; either purposely obscuring the meaning with poor form, or as a result of trying to convey a lot of information all at once (hence the overuse of acronymns).
I also went to Fullsail with a guy who claimed to know the real orgin of PWNED and was there to witness it’s birth. He used to be a professional FPSer; yes, he was on a team that got PAID to play things like Counterstrike and so forth. Of course, his team spent quite a lot of time practicing. This day, one of their team members was doing incredibly badly and kept being “owned”. Normally, when someone was “owned” (as in beaten badly), they’d be jeered at through the console via the word “owned.”
Well, said player managed an incredible comeback, managing to kill all the other players within less of a minute. He wrote up a little script that was supposed to print “owned!” a whole bunch of times. But he mistyped it and didn’t notice until too late… resulting in a string of “pwned!” coming across the screen. This blunted his otherwise impressive turn-around as the rest of his team laughed hysterically at his idiocy. They then began to use the term themselves as a way to poke fun at the guy and the meme began to spread.
So, when you use the term “pwned”, you’re really making fun of Leetspeakers and how stupid they look even after an impressive gaming feat.
You obviously never played SC or WC3 online. You forgot
GL All = Good luck all
GG = Goodgame
hax = map hacks
TvB = top vs bottom
I could go on, but I should really stop procrastinating and do my damned homework.
And don’t forget, the random Korean characters which I can’t reproduce.
-Josh
P.S. My name is derivative of 1337speak sux0rz!
The addition of -x0rz developed directly from leet-speakers referring to themselves as “Hax0rz”, ie – hackers. This carried through to other plural forms of words such as Suckers, F***ers, Rockers, and so on/so forth. Thus: Sux0rz, F*x0rz, R0x0rz, etc.
The term was then taken and applied to just about everything. Max0rz, Lagx0rz, Pineapplex0rz, Masterbax0rz, L33tx0rz. As you can see, it’s quite amazing.
Sux0rz to the Max0rz!
Thank you Dannyx0rz for that enlightening examination of elite excrement!
In reply to DarthCthulu, I realize it’s not actually a real language. My goal was to give it fake praise by calling it as such. That is a cool story though about the origin of pwned. On a different note, I never played SC or WC online, but I do recognize those terms. I started making the list that came to my mind right away and didn’t want to list EVERY single one. I also had to stop procrastinating to do homework. Please keep adding to my list as there are many that I have yet to see that I find hilarious.
Popular among online poker players is:
nh = Nice Hand
vnh = Very Nice Hand
gl = Good Luck
HS = Hail Satan!
The SC and WC3 mention brings up a good point. Does this mean that various slang that we use in SC is classified as l3tsp3k?
“Going Metal” Does not mean that I am transforming my right arm into a big hunk of T-1 Grade Steel.
“Toss Salad” Does not mean that I am going to do something indecent with Bartoneus.
To sum up the language vs. dialect vs. neither discussion:
I would say that it is in fact a dialect. Per my English Language class at UMCP (that’s acronym for University of Maryland, College Park), a dialect is “a form of a language sufficiently distinguishable from other forms (i.e., with a large number of features in common) as to be recognizeable as a distinct entity.” Calling it leetspeak and identifying it as such makes it a dialect. That’s unfortunate.
O, you need to make up some leetspeak for the term aforementioned. You sure do like that word huh? J/K. But… YOU MOM’S AFOREMENTIONED! Not J/K biznitch! 1 pwn3d ur @z!
Now, my questoin is does l33sp3ak cross the boundaries into other languages that use our alphabet? Could the dream of esperanto finally be realized by a bunch of pimple faced masturbatin’ legions of WoW players?
I’ve heard “zerg” used as a verb as well. I’d forgotten about tossing salads, I use to do that w/Bartoneus all the time! Bartoneus use to describe my toss strat as zerging someone w/the protoss, I laughed at that maniacally.
A term that I feel deserves mention is not an abbreviation, per se, but rather something heard in the immortal Red vs. Blue:
“Teamkilling F**ktard!”
see also: the l337 star wars episode iii trailer, “Stop TKing, you fag!!?!?!”