Gematria Calculator

What is gematria?

Gematria is the practice of reading letters as numbers and comparing words whose letters add up to the same total. It comes from the Hebrew alphabet, whose 22 letters also served as numerals: aleph is 1, bet is 2, yod is 10, qof is 100, tav is 400. Jewish interpreters used these sums to link words in the Bible and the rabbinic writings, and the word itself appears in the Mishnah, in the tractate Avot.

A classic Hebrew example is chai (חי, "life"): chet 8 plus yod 10 makes 18, which is why gifts of 18 or multiples of 18 are a custom among many Jews. Another: ahavah (אהבה, "love") and echad (אחד, "one") both come to 13.

Gematria before Hebrew: Assyria and Greece

The idea is older than the word. An inscription of the Assyrian king Sargon II (8th century BCE) says the wall of his city Khorsabad was built 16,283 cubits long to match the numerical value of his name. The Greeks had the same habit with their own alphabetic numerals and called it isopsephy. Suetonius (Life of Nero, 39) records a joke scrawled in Rome: the Greek name Nero (Νέρων: 50 + 5 + 100 + 800 + 50) totals 1005, the same as the Greek phrase "killed his own mother".

The most famous number in the New Testament may be gematria too. Many scholars read the 666 of Revelation 13:18 as Nero Caesar written in Hebrew letters (נרון קסר: 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200 = 666). Some early manuscripts read 616, which matches the spelling without the final nun. Type נרון קסר into the calculator to check it.

English gematria is a modern invention

English has no tradition of letters as numerals, so every English cipher is a later invention. Wikipedia's history of gematria dates the first English system to the poet John Skelton in 1523. The ciphers most calculators show today, including the six on this page, are much newer conventions spread by websites. Their names can mislead: English Sumerian has nothing to do with ancient Sumer, and the cipher sites call Jewish is not used in Jewish tradition, which works with Hebrew letters. We could not find a documented origin for that table, so we only say what it is: the Latin alphabet laid over the Hebrew number sequence.

None of this makes the ciphers wrong to play with. It means a match between two English words tells you about the cipher, not about the words. With 26 letters and totals that mostly fall between 30 and 300, coincidences are guaranteed: in English Ordinal, tarot (T20 + A1 + R18 + O15 + T20), gematria and Jesus all come to 74.

How each cipher works, with a worked example

Each example uses the word LOVE (letters L, O, V, E).

• English Ordinal (also called Simple): each letter is its place in the alphabet, A = 1 to Z = 26. L12 + O15 + V22 + E5 = 54.
• Full Reduction (Pythagorean): each letter's place is reduced to one digit, so the values run 1 to 9 three times (J = 1, S = 1). L3 + O6 + V4 + E5 = 18. This is the same table as Pythagorean numerology.
• Reverse Ordinal: the alphabet counted backwards, A = 26 to Z = 1. L15 + O12 + V5 + E22 = 54.
• Reverse Full Reduction: the reverse values reduced to one digit (A = 8, H = 1, I = 9, Z = 1). L6 + O3 + V5 + E4 = 18.
• English Sumerian: English Ordinal times six, A = 6 to Z = 156. 54 x 6 = 324.
• Jewish (Latin letters): A to I = 1 to 9, K to S = 10 to 90, T to Z = 100 to 500 in the order T U X Y Z, with J = 600, V = 700 and W = 900. L20 + O50 + V700 + E5 = 775.
• Hebrew, Mispar Hechrachi (standard value): aleph 1 to tet 9, yod 10 to tsadi 90, qof 100 to tav 400. שלום (shalom) = shin 300 + lamed 30 + vav 6 + mem 40 = 376. The five final forms (ך ם ן ף ץ) count the same as their ordinary letters.
• Hebrew, Mispar Gadol: the same, except the final forms count 500 to 900 (final kaf 500, mem 600, nun 700, pe 800, tsadi 900). Shalom ends in a final mem, so it becomes 936.

The ciphers side by side

The value of every Latin letter in each cipher on this page. Letters with accents count as the plain letter (é = E, ß = SS), the same rule as our numerology calculators. Digits, spaces and punctuation count zero.

The Jewish values for J, V and W, and the whole table, match the two calculators we checked: gematrix.org and Omni Calculator.

Gematria and numerology

Full Reduction is the Pythagorean numerology table, so reducing a name's Full Reduction or English Ordinal total gives its numerology expression number. The calculator does this for you and links to the meaning of the result: 74 reduces to 7 + 4 = 11, a master number in numerology, so tarot and gematria both point to number 11. For the full method with vowels and consonants, use the numerology calculator.

Treat any of it as a cultural and numerical curiosity. A cipher total does not predict events, health, money or anything about a person, and two words sharing a value is a property of the arithmetic.

Questions

More readings

See all tarot spreads · Guides