Gematria is arithmetic dressed up as alphabet. Every letter is assigned a number, you add the numbers, and the word has a value. That is the whole method. What makes it feel complicated is that there is no single agreed table of letter values — there are dozens, and a word has a different value in each one.
This guide walks through the calculation on paper, using the cipher almost everyone starts with.
Step 1: write down the letter values
The default English cipher is English Ordinal: A is 1, B is 2, and so on to Z is 26. Nothing clever, just the alphabet numbered in order.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
Most people can rebuild this table from memory in under a minute, which is exactly why English Ordinal became the standard.
Step 2: convert your word letter by letter
Take the word Cross.
- C = 3
- R = 18
- O = 15
- S = 19
- S = 19
Step 3: add
3 + 18 + 15 + 19 + 19 = 74.
That is the gematria of Cross in English Ordinal. You can check it against every other word that lands there on the page for the number 74.
The two mistakes everyone makes
Dropping repeated letters. Cross has two S's and both count. A word's value counts letters, not distinct letters.
Assuming case or punctuation matters. cross, Cross and CROSS all equal 74. An apostrophe, a hyphen or a comma contributes nothing. Spaces contribute nothing either, so New York is simply the letters of New plus the letters of York.
Digits are the one genuine ambiguity. Most calculators, this one included, treat a digit as having no letter value — if you want the number seven to count, write it as a word.
Step 4: reduce, if the cipher asks for it
The second most common cipher is Full Reduction, where every letter collapses to a single digit: A–I are 1–9, J–R start again at 1–9, and S–Z run 1–8. It is the same alphabet, folded into nine values.
For Cross: C = 3, R = 9, O = 6, S = 1, S = 1, giving 20.
So one word already has two perfectly legitimate answers, 74 and 20, depending on which table you used. Neither is wrong. This is why anyone quoting a gematria value should say which cipher produced it — and why a calculator that shows all 36 ciphers at once saves an argument.
Checking your work
Two habits catch nearly every arithmetic slip:
- Add the letters in a different order. Addition is commutative; if the second run disagrees with the first, one of them is wrong.
- Compare against a known word. Jesus, Cross, Messiah, Jewish and Gematria all equal 74 in English Ordinal. If your table gives one of them anything else, the table is wrong, not the word.
That last group is a fair illustration of why gematria interests people at all: five words with nothing arithmetically in common land on the same number. Whether that means anything is a question the arithmetic cannot answer — but the arithmetic is easy to verify, and it should be verified before anything is built on it.
When to stop doing it by hand
Doing it by hand is worth it once, for the same reason long division is worth doing once. After that, the interesting questions are the ones a pencil is bad at: which of the 36 ciphers two phrases share, what else in a corpus of 280,000 phrases equals your number, what today's date adds up to. Those are lookups, not sums.
Type a word into the calculator and you get all 36 values at once, each one a link to everything else that shares it.