Hakspeak

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What Does Hakspeak Mean?

Hakspeak is a type of alternative text representation for certain words or characters. It involves substituting numbers or symbols for letters of the English or western alphabet. Other hakspeak systems may also exist for other world languages and alphabets.

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Based on the term hacker, hakspeak has evolved into a kind of common code used to transmit messages in secret ways geared toward confusing those who are not knowledgeable about the hakspeak system.

Hakspeak is also known as leetspeak, leet speak and leetspeek.

Techopedia Explains Hakspeak

Hakspeak is generally considered to be another form of digital slang or jargon. Like Internet slang or chat speak, hakspeak simply involves using alternate sets of characters to code or represent ideas in different ways over digital communications media, like email, instant messaging (IM) or chat platforms. However, hakspeak also is used within communities of hackers or tax savvy users.

In some cases, hackers or spammers effectively use hakspeak to encode some text in ways that evade monitoring systems or filters. This is why some parties use hakspeak to circumvent legitimate email filtering or other processes seeking to provide quality or shield users from harm.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.