What is gematria?

Gematria is the practice of assigning numerical values to letters, so that every word and phrase adds up to a number. Two words that share a number are considered connected — and finding those connections is the heart of the practice.

Where gematria comes from

The tradition is ancient. Hebrew scribes used letter-numbers long before separate numeral symbols existed: aleph was 1, bet was 2, yod was 10, kuf was 100. Because every Hebrew word was also a number, readers of scripture noticed when two words shared a value, and a rich interpretive tradition grew around those coincidences. The Greeks practiced the same art under the name isopsephy — famously, graffiti in Pompeii declares love for a woman “whose number is 545.”

Medieval Kabbalists systematized gematria as one of the classic techniques for interpreting the Torah, and the practice has been rediscovered by every generation since — from Renaissance scholars who applied it to Latin and English, to Aleister Crowley's Thelemic ciphers, to today's online communities searching headlines and names for shared numbers.

How a cipher works

A cipher is simply a table that maps each letter to a value. The most common English cipher, English Ordinal, counts the alphabet in order: a=1, b=2 … z=26. “Jesus” becomes 10+5+19+21+19 = 74. Change the table and the same word yields a different number — Full Reduction cycles values 1–9 (giving 11), while Satanic starts the count at 36 (giving 249).

This calculator organizes its 36 ciphers into six families:

• English — Ordinal, the four Reduction variants, Extended, the case-sensitive Bacon ciphers, and Satanic.
• Reverse — the same nine tables counted from z backwards.
• Jewish — Latin-alphabet adaptations of Hebrew numeration, following the traditional 27-character ordering.
• Kabbalah — the ALW, KFW and LCH permutation ciphers from the Thelemic tradition.
• Mathematical — letters mapped to primes, squares, triangular numbers and Sumerian sixes.
• Other — Septenary, Chaldean, phone Keypad and Fibonacci mappings.

Reduction: the number behind the number

Practitioners often reduce a total to a single digit by adding its digits repeatedly: 1998 → 1+9+9+8 = 27 → 2+7 = 9. The calculator shows this reduction beside every value (you can turn it off in settings).

How to use the calculator

1. Type any word or phrase on the calculator — every enabled cipher computes instantly as you type.
2. Click any result card for the full letter-by-letter breakdown and that cipher's complete a–z chart.
3. Type a number instead — say 74 — and the calculator searches the database for every phrase that equals it in any cipher.
4. Use the ciphers page to choose which of the 36 ciphers you work with.

A note on interpretation

With 36 ciphers and an unlimited supply of words, shared numbers are easy to find — that is precisely what makes gematria fascinating as a contemplative and cultural practice, and equally why a match is not proof of anything by itself. This site computes the numbers accurately and leaves the meaning to you.