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However, leetspeak is not popular amongst all hackers. It is thought that leetspeak has lost some of its eliteness after "everybody" started to use it. It is nonetheless a cultural phenomenon well-known amongst hackers and many other Internet users.
Certain factions maintain that "true" leetspeak is spelled correctly, with the exceptions described above. They do not consider the use of extreme short forms (such as "b" for "be", or "u" for "you") as leetspeak; instead, they refer to it by such terms as " AOL speak". This is because they associate such habits with users who came to the Internet later, many of whom first used software such as AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger to communicate with each other. Another convention sometimes associated with leetspeak or Internet chatting is capitalizing every other letter (LiKe ThIs), sometimes called studlycaps or stickycaps. A similar habit involves capitalizing every letter except for vowels (LiKe THiS).
The term leet comes from the word elite. Leet can be either pronounced as "leet" (monosyllabic, rhymes with "meat", SAMPA /li:t/) or by pronouncing the L separate from the rest of the word ("el eat" (elite)", SAMPA /Eli:t/). Leetspeak is a form of written slang or street talk for the information highway. It is sometimes used to create group identity and to obscure meaning from outsiders, especially newbiesThe informal term newbie n00b or noob in leetspeak is not the same) means a newcomer to a particular corner of cyberspace, such as a game, newsgroup, or the World Wide Web itself or to an operating system. It can be both a disparaging and friendly term; a (which may be written n00bs). It also establishes a hierarchy, as more complex forms of leet are increasingly unreadable to the untrained eye. Consider the phrase "PHr3Ku3N7ly H4s|{3d K0o£St330nZ!" It translates to "frequently asked questions". Note the extraneous h in front of asked and the construction "-teeonz" as meaning "-tions".). Simple forms of leetspeak have become rather mainstreamMainstream is a term most often applied in the arts—i. music, literature, and performance—to something that is not out of the ordinary or unusual; something that is familiar to the masses; something that belongs to an identifiable genre, such as detective, as employees use the alternative spellings to circumvent their companies' mail filterA mail filter is a piece of software which takes an input of an email message. For its output, it might pass the message through unchanged for delivery to the user's mailbox, it might redirect the message for delivery elsewhere, or it might even throw thes designed to censor coarse language and other objectionable content.
One probable explanation of its origin is from bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the 1980sMillennia: 1st millennium 2nd millennium 3rd millennium Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s Years: 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 Events and trends and early 1990sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s 2040s Years: Events and trends Computers, technology Explosive growth of the Internet; decrease in the cost of computers and other techn. It started from the hackers who were trying to participate in spurious activities. Many BBSs didn't want these things happening on their servers, so they would filter or ban people who talked about questionable topics. Most notably the word "hacker" became one of the "naughty" words. Rather than leave to more boring domains, the simply replaced "hacker" with a slightly different variaton. ("hack0r", "h4cker", etc.) These got banned too, and then they would change the word more and more until it was barely recognizable. ("h4x0r", "|-|^><()|z") Eventually the system adminstrators realized that there was no way of banning words in a polymorphic language like Leet.
This later turned into the condition where having "elite" status on a BBS allowed a user access to file areas, games, and special chat rooms, often including archives of pirated software, pornography, and text files of dubious quality documenting topics such as how to construct explosives and manufacture illegal drugs. Some people think that leetspeak or hakspek that shortens text may have been developed to decrease bandwidth usage before the bandwidth explosion of the 1990s, but this is most likely not the case, as such methods would have had extremely minimal effect on actual bandwidth usage.
Leetspeak is regaining popularity in SMS (Short Message Service) media. More recently, leet has re-entered the mainstream thanks to its use on various popular websites such as blogs, webcomics and forums. People who enjoy irony sometimes use leetspeak to draw attention to "secrets" they believe no one actually cares about, to joke, or emphasize a nuance.
Websites exist that are written entirely in leetspeak. There are also converter programs which automatically convert ordinary English text into leet, at varying levels of complexity (depending on how 1337 the program is).