Guide

Gematria ciphers explained

A cipher is the rule a calculator uses to turn letters into numbers. There is no single gematria, only a stack of ciphers, and each one gives the same word a different total.

This guide walks through the main ones: where they came from, how they assign their values, and which carry real history versus a borrowed name. Some of these ciphers are genuinely old. Most are not, and knowing the difference is half of reading gematria well, so the page is honest about it.

What a cipher is

At its simplest, a cipher hands every letter a number, and a word's value is the sum of its letters. Change the cipher and the value changes, which is why one word can sit on a dozen different numbers at once. The calculator runs them together so you can compare. None of the ciphers is the correct one. You use whichever your method calls for.

The two old traditions: Hebrew and Greek

Gematria began with alphabets that doubled as number systems. In Hebrew, aleph is 1, bet is 2, and the count climbs to 400 at tav, so every Hebrew word already carries a number. Jewish scholars used this for centuries to read scripture, comparing words that share a value. One classic case sits in Genesis, where Abraham sets out with 318 men; because the name of his servant Eliezer also adds up to 318, some read the verse as Eliezer alone. Hebrew gematria has four standard methods, Standard (Mispar Hechrachi), Large (Mispar Gadol), Ordinal (Mispar Siduri) and Reduced (Mispar Katan), all shown on the Hebrew gematria calculator.

The Greeks did the same with their alphabet, a practice they called isopsephy, where alpha is 1 and omega is 800. The best-known example is the Greek spelling of Jesus, which comes to 888, read by early Christians as a deliberate answer to the 666 of Revelation. Most scholars read that 666 as Nero Caesar. The Greek gematria calculator covers the Greek methods.

The core English ciphers

Applying gematria to English is far more recent. The ones you will meet most often are:

• English Ordinal sets A to 1 and counts up to 26 at Z. It is the plain starting point, also called simple gematria.
• Reverse Ordinal flips the count, so A is 26 and Z is 1.
• Full Reduction folds every value to a single digit, so the letters cycle 1 to 9 and start over. It is the same scheme as modern Pythagorean numerology, though that name misleads: the system was built in the early 1900s and only borrows Pythagoras's name.
• Jewish, also labelled Latin or Agrippa, climbs in larger jumps, A is 1, K is 10, T is 100. It was written down by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1531, a Christian author on occult philosophy. The "Jewish" label is a misnomer: the cipher puts Hebrew-style values on the Latin alphabet, but it was never part of Jewish tradition.

The English gematria calculator shows these and the rest. For the full letter values side by side, see the A to Z chart.

Reduced values and master numbers

Numerology often takes a total and reduces it to a single digit by adding its digits, again and again, so 83 becomes 8 plus 3, which is 11. The numbers 11, 22 and 33 are the exception. They are left alone and called master numbers, on the idea that they carry extra weight. The calculator shows this reduced value under any featured total above nine. To see the rest of what a value holds, like its factors or whether it is prime, look it up on the number properties page.

Sumerian and Satanic

Two of the more striking names hide simple rules.

• Sumerian is English Ordinal multiplied by six, so A is 6 and Z is 156. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with ancient Sumer, whose people counted in base sixty with wedge-shaped marks and used no letter alphabet. The six is usually read as a nod to 666.
• Satanic starts at 36 and runs to 61, so A is 36 and Z is 61. The starting point is chosen because 666 is the 36th triangular number, the sum of 1 through 36. It is a modern cipher built around that number.

Both belong to the modern English gematria scene that grew online in the 2010s, where this style of decoding is popular.

The exception ciphers

A cluster of ciphers are reductions with a twist. They reduce most letters to a single digit but hold a few back at a higher value, and they exist only in modern English gematria tools.

• Single Reduction reduces as normal but keeps S at 10.
• KV Exception keeps K at 11 and V at 22, as master numbers, instead of reducing them to 2 and 4.
• SKV Exception does the same and also holds S at 10.
• EP and EHP Exception are the reverse-side versions, keeping E at 22, P at 11, and, for EHP, H at 10.

The letters singled out are the ones that fall on 10, 11 or 22, the numbers this community treats as significant.

Chaldean numerology

Chaldean numerology stands apart because it does not follow the alphabet. It gives the letters values from 1 to 8, grouped by sound rather than order, and never uses 9 for a letter. It is sold as the oldest system, rooted in ancient Babylon, but that story does not hold up. The form used today was popularised by a celebrity palmist named Cheiro in the 1920s, and the rule that 9 is too sacred to assign is a modern invention. The name is old; the system is not.

The mathematical ciphers

A final group maps the alphabet onto a number sequence. These are clever constructions rather than traditions, and all are modern.

• Primes gives each letter the next prime number, so A is 2, B is 3, C is 5.
• Squares uses the square numbers, A is 1, B is 4, C is 9.
• Trigonal uses the triangular numbers, A is 1, B is 3, C is 6, D is 10.
• Fibonacci follows the Fibonacci sequence, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 and on up.
• Septenary counts 1 to 7 and mirrors back down, a system put together by Marty Leeds.
• Keypad uses the digits on a phone keypad, so A, B and C are all 2.

The Qabalistic English ciphers

A small group of English ciphers grew out of the modern occult revival, in the current that follows Aleister Crowley. They reorder the alphabet rather than counting straight up from A to Z.

• English Qaballa, also called the ALW cipher, sets A to 1, L to 2 and W to 3, then carries on in that order. It was drawn from Crowley's Book of the Law, and it has the largest following of the three.
• Trigrammaton, or TQ, values the letters from 0 to 25 and ties them to a set of twenty-seven trigrams.
• Cipher X is a lesser-known rearrangement of 1 to 26 from the same scene.

All three are modern. You can switch them on from the Customise panel on the gematria calculator.

Which ciphers are old, and which are new

It helps to keep the history straight.

• Genuinely old: Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy, where the alphabet was the number system. The idea runs back thousands of years.
• Renaissance: the Jewish or Agrippa cipher, from Agrippa's 1531 book.
• Modern: nearly everything else. English Ordinal as a practice in its own right, Full Reduction, the reverse ciphers, Sumerian, Satanic, the exception ciphers, the mathematical ones and the Qabalistic English ciphers were all shaped in the last century or two, much of it online in the 2010s.

A borrowed name like Sumerian, Satanic or Chaldean does not make a cipher ancient. The numbers each one produces are exact and repeatable. What they mean, and which cipher is worth your attention, is the part you decide.

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