Internet slang has seeped into our everyday vocabulary thanks to technology enthusiasts or run-of-the-mill people looking for shorthand to save keystrokes or hackers seeking code to cloak their messages.
The trend has brought with it geeky terms that could have only been conceived by those who have spent years living in front of a computer monitor.
Geek speak has gained recognition by the likes of the Oxford English Dictionary. Last year, it even added "lol," which for the uninitiated means "laughing out loud" or "laugh out loud."
The origins of many tech terms, though, remain a mystery.
Many of them originated back in the early days of the Internet before it was carefully indexed and cached by Google. So, it may be impossible to find the first user of a term like W00t, a common Internet slang interjection to express excitement, for example. However, some of these terms have a clearer origin that even pre-date the Internet culture that made them famous.
Here are five Internet slang terms with a surprising history you might not know.
Leet
This is both a geeky term and an entire language more commonly called "Leetspeak." The definition of the term leet is shorthand for the word elite. For example: "Those are some leet game competitors."
Leetspeak, the language, is like a digital version of Pig Latin except much more complicated, used to create private speech. In Leetspeak, letters are replaced with numbers and symbols. For example "leet" itself would be spelled 1337.
The origins of the Leet language date back to the 1980s and days of bulletin boards, which were the primordial soup where a lot of Internet slang first came from. Leetspeak soon gained popularity within the hacker community as a way of communicating in code on websites and newsgroups. Cloaking their activities in Leetspeak allowed them to hide their discussions from search engines and keyword searches.
The methodology for translating into leetspeak is often haphazard with multiple ways of translating some letters. If you want to try out leetspeak for yourself you can consult a handy chart or cheat by using one of the many leetspeaktranslators on the Web.
Pwn
This term seems to have fallen somewhat out of favor in recent years as Internet slang due to overuse in the early part of the 2000s, but there was a time when you didn't beat people at videogames, you pwned them.
