More obscure forms of leet, involving the use of symbol combinations and almost no letters or numbers, continue to be used for its original purpose of encrypted communication. Some consider emoticons and ASCII art, like smiley faces, to be leet, while others maintain that leet consists of only symbolic word encryption. It is now also used to mock newbies, also known colloquially as n00bs, or newcomers, on websites, or in gaming communities. Once reserved for hackers, crackers, and script kiddies, leet later entered the mainstream. Creative misspellings and ASCII-art-derived words were also a way to attempt to indicate one was knowledgeable about the culture of computer users. One theory is that it was developed to defeat text filters created by BBS or Internet Relay Chat system operators for message boards to discourage the discussion of forbidden topics, like cracking and hacking. The Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective has been credited with the original coining of the term, in their text-files of that era. Leet originated within bulletin board systems (BBS) in the 1980s, where having 'elite' status on a BBS allowed a user access to file folders, games, and special chat rooms. The leet lexicon includes spellings of the word as 1337 or leet.

The term 'leet' is derived from the word elite, used as an adjective to describe skill or accomplishment, especially in the fields of online gaming and computer hacking. There are many dialects or linguistic varieties in different online communities. Additionally, it modifies certain words based on a system of suffixes and alternate meanings. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. Leet (or ' 1337'), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. A 'HACKER' (elite hacker) laptop sticker, along with a Kevin Mitnick sticker For other uses, see Leet (disambiguation).

Hacked textart