> hey guys. I don't know if there was thread on this earlier. Who can tell me where Hax0r talk comes from? All this l337 and W00t! business has me pretty confused. What the heck does w00t! mean anyway? If you spend any amount of time playing games online, you can't help but start to wonder after a while. It would r0x0r if someone could clear it up. Thanks!

First things first: w00t is almost certainly derived from "Whooo!" (as in "Whoo-Hoo!") and means pretty much the same thing. It's just an exclamation of joy.

As for the rest of it, well, it sort of developed. A lot of it started just as short hand and stuff, and back in the days of things like BBSes the sort of underground hackers (who were mostly fairly young) started doing thIngS liKe u51nG numbers as letters and alternating case just to look cool/different. Of course, as the net came about and mainstream people got access to computers and the internet and a bunch of moronic 13-year old boys that had watched "Hackers" too many times basically stole it and made it far stupider than before. Blame AOL.

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