The Word Decoder
Type any word or name. It comes back as a stream of the 22 Hebrew letters, with what each one carries.
A word is spelled in Latin letters. This reads it back in the 22 Hebrew ones — matching sound to sound — and then tells you what that stream of letters carries, because in this system each letter is not a character but a force with an element, a class, a number and a attached.
What it computes
- 01Lowercase what you typed and walk it one character at a time.
- 02Check for a two-letter sound first — sh, ch, tz, ts, th, kh — because SHIN is one letter, not S followed by H.
- 03Otherwise take the single character and map it to the Hebrew letter that makes the same sound.
- 04Anything with no Hebrew equivalent — a digit, an apostrophe — is set aside and shown to you, not silently dropped.
- 05Add up each letter's gematria value (Aleph 1, Bet 2 … Tav 400). That is the sum.
- 06Add the digits of the sum together, again and again, until one digit is left — unless it lands on 11, 22 or 33, which this system keeps whole.
- 07Count how many letters of each element appeared. The most common one is the word's dominant element.
How to read it
Read the stream first and the numbers second. The letters are the word's ingredients — a word made of Fire letters behaves differently from one made of Earth letters, whatever it means in English. The sum is the word's weight; the reduced root is which of the nine (or eleven) basic numbers that weight settles on.
What it does not claim
This is a sound , not a translation, and not Hebrew. Typing an English word does not give you the Hebrew word for it — it gives you what that English word would look like if you spelled the noise of it with Hebrew letters. Real Hebrew gematria is done on real Hebrew spellings; this is a symbolic instrument built on top of the idea, and the meanings it returns are the site's letter-attributions, tier C, not a linguistic finding.
Looking for the Rosetta Translator instead?
There are two different instruments and they are easy to confuse. This page takes a word — any word, in English — and spells it in Hebrew letters. The Rosetta Translator takes a term — a letter, a card, an angel, a sign, a frequency — and shows you every other tradition's name for that same thing. And the Grand Table is all 72 arcs of the circle laid out at once. Different questions, three doors.
Nothing you type is stored, sent anywhere, or logged. The whole decoding runs in this browser tab.
The letter stream
Left to right in the order you typed them. Each card shows which piece of your word made it, the Hebrew letter it became, its element, its number, and the tarot trump that shares it.
What came out
Four figures, and none of them mean anything on their own — so each one carries its own line.
Elemental signature
Which of the four temperaments the word is built out of. A word with all four is balanced and slow; a word missing one has to borrow that quality from somewhere else.
will, drive, the spark that acts
thought, speech, breath — the messenger
feeling, memory, the tides of the heart
body, money, structure — what persists
What kinds of letter it used
The 22 letters come in three classes, and the mix tells you how the word behaves.
one of the three elemental grounds — Air, Water, Fire. It does not act; it is the field the others move in.
one of the seven planetary switches. Each can run either way — peace or war, wealth or poverty — which is why they are called double.
one of the twelve zodiacal channels. Each points in one steady direction and does not reverse.
How does a letter get chosen?
By sound, one piece at a time, with two-letter sounds checked before single ones. Below is the whole scheme — every Latin character, the Hebrew letter it lands on, and why. Nothing here is hidden or weighted; if you disagree with a row you can see exactly which row to disagree with.
Aleph is the silent breath — the open vowel with no consonant in front of it.
Same sound, same letter. The simplest case.
Same sound.
Same sound.
Heh is the breathy H. English E most often carries that same open exhale, so both ride it.
Vav is the hook — the letter that does duty as V, W and the vowel OO in Hebrew itself.
Same sound.
The back-of-the-throat scrape in loch and Chanukah. Only the digraph triggers it — a soft English ch (as in church) is not this sound, and this is one of the scheme's rough edges.
Hebrew has two T letters. Tet is the softer one, and it takes the plain English T.
Yod is the smallest letter and the consonant-Y; English I, J and Y all sit on that one sound.
Every hard /k/ — cat, kite, khan — is one sound, and Hebrew writes it Kaf. A soft C as in city is NOT redirected to Samekh; the scheme reads letters, not context.
Same sound.
Same sound.
Same sound.
Samekh is the plain hissing S. X is read as its /ks/ tail rather than dropped.
Ayin is a silent throat-letter with no English equal. The scheme gives it O — the open round vowel — because something has to carry O and Ayin is the vowel-shaped hole in the alphabet.
Peh is P and F both, exactly as in Hebrew, where one letter carries the hard and soft forms.
The TS sound at the end of cats. Only the digraph triggers it.
The deep back-of-the-mouth K. English Q is always this letter.
Same sound.
The SH sound. Only the digraph triggers it — a lone S stays Samekh.
Hebrew's other T, historically the soft TH. Only the digraph triggers it, which is why THIN opens on Tav and TIN opens on Tet.
The honest weak points. Three of these rows are judgement calls rather than facts. O → Ayin pairs a vowel with a silent throat-letter because the alphabet has no better home for O. T → Tet but TH → Tav splits English's single T sound across Hebrew's two T letters on a spelling cue rather than a sound one. And CH always takes the throat-scrape of loch, so church comes out harsher than it sounds. They are conventions, they are consistent, and they are visible — which is the most this instrument can honestly offer.
Why does the Name Engine give me different letters?
Because it runs a different scheme, and the site would rather say so than quietly pick a winner.
This page maps by sound. C and K make the same noise, so both become Kaf. The Name Engine maps by position — the third letter of the Latin alphabet becomes the third letter of the Hebrew one, so C becomes Gimel. Feed “Cameron” to each and you get two different streams and two different gematria totals, both correctly computed.
Which is canonical is the author's call and he has not made it. Until he does, each page names the scheme it ran rather than presenting its answer as the answer. If you want the older, more traditional flavour, use the sound scheme on this page; if you want the one wired into the gate engine and the name lattice, use the Name Engine.
Where does gematria come from?
It began as bookkeeping, not mysticism. Ancient Hebrew — like ancient Greek — had no separate symbols for numbers, so the alphabet did double duty: the first nine letters counted 1 through 9, the next nine counted 10 through 90, and the last four counted 100 through 400. Every written word therefore already had a total, whether anyone meant it to or not. The Greeks played the same game with their own alphabet and called it isopsephy. Once every word is secretly a number, noticing that two words land on the same number is irresistible — and that noticing is gematria.
In Jewish tradition it became a respectable tool of interpretation, not a parlour trick. It turns up in the Talmud and the midrash as one of the recognized ways of reading scripture closely. The classic example: Genesis says Abraham rescued his kinsman with 318 trained men, and the old commentators observed that 318 is exactly the value of the name of his servant Eliezer — reading the number as the man. Centuries later the medieval took the method much further, treating a shared total as a shared essence, a hidden family resemblance between words that look unrelated on the surface.
The tarot column on this page's letter cards is a far younger graft. Nothing in the older Hebrew tradition mentions cards; the pairing of the 22 letters with the 22 trumps is nineteenth-century European occultism. The French writer proposed it in the 1850s, and in England later re-keyed it one step — the two schools still disagree about where The Fool goes. This site's letter table uses the Golden Dawn key (Aleph = The Fool) as its stated default, and keeps the older Continental key as a labelled alternate rather than mixing the two silently.
What the tradition actually claims is worth stating plainly: a shared total marks two words as related — an invitation to compare them — never as proof of anything. The arithmetic on this page is exact and you can check every step of it; what the numbers mean is interpretation, and this site files it as such. And remember this page adds one extra remove from the source: it sums an English word respelled by sound, where the tradition sums real Hebrew spellings. Both are honest instruments. Only one of them is ancient.
The words on this page
Before you take a number too seriously
Go further