Leet Translator (Difficulty: Insane)

This is a super advanced leet speak translator. The leet alphabet is randomised and has all possible variants of the different leet letter symbols based on a US keyboard. If you can understand the text that is generated by this leet converter, you are most certainly 3|_{-3''|''.

After typing or pasting, press SHIFT to toggle through different leet conversions of your text.

Leet speak is a continually evolving phenomenon, and so to exectly define what it is would be silly because it could become very quickly incorrect. With this in mind I'll only provide a very high level overview of the leet "language".

People who are roughly aquainted with leet may think of it as simply a set of character replacement rules. Instead of using regular letters of the Latin alphabet (a, b, c, d, ...), other characters or sets of characters which resemble the desired characters are used in their place (4, 8, {, ol).

This is a reasonable definition, but modern leet speak has evolved beyond simple substitution rules. Leet speak might best be described as a new alphabet which must be transliterated into English to be properly understood. For example, the word "banned" in English is translated into "b&" in some forms of leet speak. The ampersand symbol represents the sound "and".

Since the more subtle features of advanced leet are often dependent on context and subject to personal preference, this translator only does the character substitution side of the leet conversion.

If you'd like to learn more about the intricacies of leet including its common grammar rules, suffixes and prefixes, conjugations and vocabulary, then check out the wiki page on Leet. There is also a simple wiki page which gives a character map and some other useful info - some of which was used to help build this translator.

The term "leet" originated during the 1980s on bulletin board systems where being "elite" meant that you had elevated privileges compared to regular forum users. Over time the term "elite" evolved into "leet" and eventually "l33t" (and eventually 10100111001).

At about the same time many forums began introducing word filters ("blacklists") to prevent foul language on the forums. If a user used bad language it was automatically filtered out or replaced with asterixes by the forum software. Forum users very quickly found a way around these blocks: simply replace one or two of the letters in their language with a similar looking character, and with that, leet speak was born.

Today, leet speak is used for more than just bypassing filters (though that is still a common use case). It is regularly used as an in-group form of communication and to confuse noobs. There are now many different leet letters for each regular letter in the alphabet. For example, some of the characters that this leet translator uses for "m" are: /|\ /v\ |^^| nn and there are many more.

With the proliferation of leet memes and onlin translation tools like this one, leet has entered popular culture and is widely recognised by regular internet users.

If one uses l33t on a regular basis, it quickly becomes impractical to use any characters beyond the ones which can be created with your keyboard. Thus, the "dialect" of leet that is spoken often depends on the types of characters which the user has available to them. On some operating systems the numpad can be used to create special unicode characters (e.g. "Ü" for "u and "Я" for "r"), but this requires memorisation of unicode codes which is often impractical and not necessary for most l33t communication.

That's the end of this short discussion on leet, now it's time to give it a shot! See if your uber haxor friends can understand what you're saying, or just scare noobs by having long conversations in this advanced form of leet. Also feel free to post some leet in the comments to practice reading and writing in leet speak.

If you've got any ideas for improving this leet translator, please let me know! You can send me ideas using the suggestions box, or you can post a comment. Thanks!

:-:@|7|"'/ !_{-371/|/9!