What is gematria? Meaning, history and how it works

Gematria meaning: a short definition

Gematria is a way of reading words as numbers. Each letter has a fixed value, the values of a word’s letters are added up, and the total is compared with the totals of other words. Words with the same total are said to be equal in gematria.

Three things are always involved:

• A cipher, the table of letter values. Hebrew and Greek have traditional ones; English has several competing ones.
• Addition. In the standard ciphers the order of the letters makes no difference.
• A comparison. A total on its own is just a number; gematria is about the words that share it.

So a value means nothing without the name of its cipher. GEMATRIA totals 444 in this site’s cipher and 74 in English Ordinal, and it has no Hebrew value until it is spelled in Hebrew letters. The glossary defines each of these terms in a line.

Where the word gematria comes from

Gematria (Hebrew גימטריה, gimatriya) is a word of rabbinic Hebrew, generally thought to be borrowed from Greek. The usual derivation is from geōmetria, “geometry”; another proposal is grammateia, a Greek word connected with letters and scribes. The question is not settled, and some scholars think both words played a part.

Early uses do not always mean counting letters. In the Mishnah (Pirkei Avot, chapter 3), gematriot sits beside tekufot, the reckoning of the seasons, and is usually translated as geometry or mathematics. Greek had its own term for words with equal totals: isopsephy, from isos, “equal”, and psēphos, a counting pebble. In English, “gematria” now names the whole family of letter–number methods, in any alphabet.

How does gematria work?

Every version follows three steps: choose a cipher, look up each letter, add. Here is GEMATRIA in the cipher this site uses, English Gematria (Base-6, also called Sumerian), where each letter is worth its position in the alphabet times six: A = 6, B = 12, and so on up to Z = 156.

G 42 + E 30 + M 78 + A 6 + T 120 + R 108 + I 54 + A 6 = 444. The second half of the method is comparison: ENGLISH, GOSPEL and JESUS also total 444, and the calculator lists every word in its database with the same value. Words with that value are also listed at /v/444, and the word’s own page is /w/gematria.

Conventions worth knowing

• Only letters count. Spaces, digits and punctuation are skipped and case is ignored, so spelling is the one thing to settle before you start.
• Totals are often reduced to a digital root by adding their digits: 444 → 4+4+4 = 12 → 1+2 = 3. In this cipher only 3, 6 and 9 can occur, so a digital root groups totals rather than telling them apart.

The full A–Z table, and what each number in a result means, are in How to use gematria.

A short history of gematria

Gematria took its classic form in the way two ancient alphabets were used, and it has been adapted many times since. An older precedent is often cited: an inscription of Sargon II of Assyria, from the eighth century BCE, says the wall of his new city, Khorsabad, was built to a length matching the number of his name.

Letters that were also numbers

In Hebrew and Greek the letters of the alphabet came to serve as numerals. In Hebrew, aleph to tet stand for 1 to 9, yod to tsadi for 10 to 90, and qof to tav for 100 to 400. Greek runs from alpha = 1 to omega = 800, with three older signs for 6, 90 and 900. When every word is also a sum, comparing sums comes naturally. The Hebrew gematria chart gives every letter and its value.

Greek isopsephy

A graffito at Pompeii, buried in 79 CE, reads “I love her whose number is 545” (φμε: 500 + 40 + 5). Christian writers in late antiquity noted that the Greek name of Jesus, Ἰησοῦς, totals 888 (10 + 8 + 200 + 70 + 400 + 200). And Revelation 13:18 asks the reader to “count the number of the beast”, which it gives as 666 (616 in a few early manuscripts), a verse widely read as gematria. 666 in gematria looks at that reading in detail.

Gematria in rabbinic interpretation

The Baraita of the 32 Rules, traditionally attributed to Rabbi Eliezer ben Yose HaGelili, lists gematria among the methods of interpreting scripture. The Talmud uses it sparingly. Hasatan, “the Satan” (השטן), totals 364, read as the days of the year on which he may accuse, Yom Kippur excepted (Yoma 20a). The 318 men Abraham leads in Genesis 14:14 are read as one man, his servant Eliezer (אליעזר), whose name totals 318 (Nedarim 32a). Medieval commentators and Kabbalists used it far more, most as one interpretive tool among several, though some, such as Abraham Abulafia, made it central to their method.

From the Renaissance to the calculator era

From the late fifteenth century, Christian scholars such as Pico della Mirandola and Johann Reuchlin took up Kabbalah, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (complete edition 1533) argued that Latin and other alphabets could carry number values too. The Jewish / Latin cipher in calculators, which some menus label “Agrippan”, builds on that idea but was standardized much later. In the late nineteenth century, S. L. MacGregor Mathers’s The Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn made Kabbalistic letter work a staple of English-language occultism; in the early twentieth, numerologists such as Cheiro (Cheiro’s Book of Numbers, 1926) popularized name numbers. The twentieth century added English Qaballa, a reordered alphabet used in Thelemic readings of Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law. Online calculators then settled on today’s menu of English ciphers, several of which, this site’s ×6 table included, have little documented history before the web. Further reading in the blog’s Cipher Atlas: the Jewish / Latin cipher, on what it does and does not owe to Agrippa, and English Sumerian, on where the ×6 table and its name come from.

The main kinds of gematria cipher

A cipher is a table of letter values, and changing the table changes every result. There are three broad families.

Same word, seven totals, but fewer independent ones. English Ordinal and this site’s cipher always differ by a factor of six (74 × 6 = 444), as do Reverse Ordinal and Reverse Sumerian (142 × 6 = 852), so each pair gives the same matches. Each letter’s Reverse Ordinal value is 27 minus its English Ordinal value, so a word’s Reverse Ordinal total is 27 times its letter count minus its English Ordinal total (for GEMATRIA, 27 × 8 − 74 = 142). Words that match in English Ordinal therefore also match in Reverse Ordinal whenever they have the same number of letters. The two reductions and Jewish / Latin depend on exactly which letters a word contains, so they reshuffle matches. The multi-cipher calculator runs any word through all seven, the cipher chart shows how they relate, and Why English gematria explains why this site works in English.

What gematria can and cannot show

Gematria is an interpretive practice, a way of reading with a long religious and literary history. It is not a method of proof or prediction, and this site does not present it as one.

GEMATRIA, JESUS, ENGLISH and GOSPEL all total 444 here. For GEMATRIA and JESUS the match holds in English Ordinal and its ×6 copy, which are really one table, and in none of the other five ciphers. Other pairs from the same four fare differently: GEMATRIA and ENGLISH also match in Full Reduction (38), and JESUS and ENGLISH in Reverse Full Reduction (34). With seven ciphers, variant spellings and digital roots to choose from, some match between two words is likely, so a match found after the fact carries little weight. How to test whether a match means anything sets out the controls, the gematria guide gives a full research workflow, and the Cipher Atlas post on choosing and combining ciphers separates the cross-cipher matches that are informative from those that are not. See also the site’s disclaimer.

Quick answers

What does gematria mean?

The practice of giving each letter a number and adding up a word's letters, so that words with equal totals can be compared. The word is Hebrew, usually traced to Greek geōmetria, geometry, though the derivation is debated.

How does gematria work?

Choose a cipher, look up each letter's value, and add. In this site's cipher, where each letter is its alphabet position times six, GEMATRIA is 42 + 30 + 78 + 6 + 120 + 108 + 54 + 6 = 444.

Is gematria Hebrew or Greek?

Both. Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy are parallel practices, because both alphabets were used as numerals. English ciphers are modern adaptations of the same idea.

Is gematria the same as numerology?

No, though they overlap. Gematria compares the totals of words, traditionally to interpret a text; popular numerology reduces a name or birth date to one digit and reads it as character. Neither proves anything about the world.

Which gematria cipher is correct?

None is objectively correct. Pick one before you start, name it whenever you quote a value, and do not switch ciphers to chase a match.

Can gematria predict the future or prove anything?

No. A shared total on its own shows only that two words add up the same under one letter table. It is worth weighing only if related words match more often than a control set does. Nothing on this site is a prediction or advice.

Is gematria in the Bible?

Revelation 13:18, which asks the reader to count the number of the beast, 666, is widely read as gematria. Whether the Hebrew Bible itself uses it is debated; the Talmud uses it occasionally, and medieval commentators and Kabbalists applied it extensively.

Sources and further reading

• Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 20a (hasatan = 364) and Nedarim 32a (Eliezer = 318).
• Mishnah, Pirkei Avot, chapter 3 (gematriot beside tekufot).
• Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Gematria” (the Sargon II inscription, and gematria in Abulafia and other Kabbalists).
• Revelation 13:18 (the number of the beast).
• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne, 1533).
• S. L. MacGregor Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled (London, 1887).
• On this site’s blog: the eight-part English Gematria Cipher Atlas, starting with Simple Ordinal.