1337

1337, or leetspeak, as a kind of language goes back to the 1980s, when users of computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) would shorten words, e.g., you to u and are to r, for convenience. As BBS administrators started to crack down on naughty content being shared on their systems, users also began substituting numbers and symbols into words to evade detection and sometimes simply to be different (using 4 for A or 3 for E, as in g4m3). A now classic example, pPorn, became p0rn (with a zero for the O), p()rn, or deliberately misspelled as pr0n.

Misspellings—and an overall visual disorientation, as in this example from Tech News, age duz not protek U frm luv bt luv 2 som Xtnt proteks U frm age, or “age does not protect you from love but love to some extent protects you from age”—are a core feature of 1337. While some misspellings appear intentional like pron, others emerged from accident, like pwn, “to totally defeat someone in a video game,” a typo for own resulting from the fact that the P is right next to the O on QWERTY keyboards. Someone who pwns another is a pwnzor and the act of doing it pwnage (with -age a favorite suffix of 1337). 

1337 itself comes from the word elite. Users with elite status on BBSs had the widest access to the system and usually had to be the best hackers in order to achieve that level of access—hence 1337 as slang for “skilled,” in contrast to n00b, or newbie. Elite was modified to leet, then written with numbers as 1337 (1 for L, 3 for E, and 7 for T).

1337 really started spreading during the late 1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with the rise of the internet and popular computing. Online video games were much more primitive then, and many were almost-entirely text-based due to graphical limitations of the time. These early role-playing games often consisted of users sending text to each other. The experienced BBS users had the computing knowledge and hardware to access these games most easily and continued to employ 1337.

As online gaming improved and computers became more accessible and less technical, 1337 spread to more and more internet users. Popular computer games of the 1990s, like Doom (1993) and Quake (1996), were both visually impressive and included online multiplayer modes, allowing players to chat with and trash-talk each other—and helping to further boost 1337.

By the early 2000s, online games like World of Warcraft had become global sensations, boasting millions of players. Around this time, games had become much more visually advanced, with typing text widely replaced by talking over microphones and headsets. But gamers had still spread 1337 to almost every gaming community through online forums and message boards.