The New Hacker's Dictionary

From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of 'pirate boards' inhabited by crackers, phone phreaks, and warez d00dz. These people (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.

Though crackers often call themselves 'hackers', they aren't (they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems). Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's. Nevertheless, this lexicon covers much of it so the reader will be able to understand what goes by on bulletin-board systems.

Here is a brief guide to cracker and warez d00dz usage:

* Misspell frequently. The substitutions

phone => fone
freak => phreak
are obligatory.

* Always substitute 'z's for 's's. (i.e. "codes" -> "codez"). The substitution of 'z' for 's' has evolved so that a 'z' is bow systematically put at the end of words to denote an illegal or cracking connection. Examples : Appz, passwordz, passez, utilz, MP3z, distroz, pornz, sitez, gamez, crackz, serialz, downloadz, FTPz, etc.

* Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey Dudes!#!$#$!#!$").

* Use the emphatic 'k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome") frequently.

* Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").

* Substitute '0' for 'o' ("r0dent", "l0zer").

* TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE TIME.

These traits are similar to those of B1FF, who originated as a parody of naive BBS users; also of his latter-day equivalent Jeff K.. Occasionally, this sort of distortion may be used as heavy sarcasm by a real hacker, as in: