Even in the early days of the internet, users often communicated with each other on message and bulletin boards. These early websites were divided into certain sections. Users could exchange files in some areas, communicate via chat in others, and read public entries, messages or posts in news sections. The users of these bulletin boards received user rights depending on their activities. What a user could do on a board, which chat rooms they could access and whether they could share files largely depended on their status. Users with elite status had access to all board features.
The tradition of assigning elite status to particularly active and experienced internet users was adopted by programmers, coders, and hackers with a certain degree of humor. To differentiate themselves from other internet users, the “leet” notation caught on as an abbreviation and distortion of the word “elite”. The spelling using double “e” can be seen as a parody of the word by the creators of leetspeak.
On early messaging boards, filters were often used by administrators in order to ban the use of certain words. For example, if users in chat rooms wrote about “hacking” or “cracking”, the filters would block the content. However, the “elite” of internet users – comprising programmers and coders – were interested in discussing these exact topics. To circumvent the filters, users developed leetspeak by replacing letters with similar-looking numbers and characters. Filters were able to easily detect and block banned words like “hacker” or “ass”, but they had difficulty identifying “H4x0r” or “@$$”.
So, what about the numbers 1337? If each of the numbers were mirrored along the vertical axis, you could easily imagine reading the word “LEET”.
Want to see leetspeak for yourself? Google offers a rather amusing leet version of its search engine. Here, the button “I am feeling lucky” is changed to “EyE Am ph33|1n6 |u(ky”. It also allows users to search for “Images” and “Videos”. In Google’s leet version, these buttons are called “Im4635” and “v1D302”.