'All your base are belong to us'- The Dictionary of Selected Internet Slang

Leet Speak

Leet is a form of spelling used online where numbers and symbols are used to replace certain letters (e.g. '7' to replace 't') along with deliberate mispellings and grammatical errors.

Hence, the phrase 'I am the elite hacker' would, in leet speak, be rendered as 'I r teh 1337 hax0r'.

Many of the internet slang terms cited in this dictionary are derived from leet speak. I have decided not to use the numerical characters in these terms to facilitate comprehension and searching (e.g. 'leet' instead of 1337').

For more about leet speak please see the links page.

Etymologies

Unless otherwise stated, all etymologies used in this dicitonary are based on information given in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org.

Pronunciation

Pronunciation for most terms is the same as in Standard English (e.g. with words such as 'deep web'). However, in instances where completely new words or phrases were coined on the internet (such as 'leet'), I have given a rough indication of pronunciation (e.g. 'LEE-t' for the above example).

It should be noted that since these words and phrases are hardly ever used in daily conversation outside the internet, there is often no consensus about the 'correct' pronunciation of any one word. The pronunciation guidelines given here are neccessarily only the opinion held by the author.

Finally,a number of terms in this dictionary are acronyms (e.g. 'MMORPG'for 'Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game'). They should be pronounced using their initial letters only (i.e. 'EM-EM-OH-AR-PEE-GEE' as opposed to, say, 'MORE-pug') unless pronunciation guidelines are given (e.g. 'MUD' for 'Multiple User Dungeon' which is actually pronounced 'mud').