Gematria Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms used across this site.
Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Gematria | The practice of giving letters number values and adding them. Traditionally Hebrew. |
| Isopsephy | The Greek version of gematria, using the numeric values of Greek letters. |
| Cipher | The table that says what number each letter has. |
| Mispar Hechrachi | The standard Hebrew method: Aleph=1 up to Tav=400. |
| Mispar Gadol | A Hebrew method that values the final letters at 500 to 900. |
| Mispar Katan | A Hebrew method that removes the zeros from each letter’s value. |
| Mispar Siduri | A Hebrew method that counts letters by alphabet position, 1 to 22. |
| Atbash, Albam, Avgad | Hebrew substitution ciphers that swap each letter for another before counting. |
| Sofit (final letter) | One of five Hebrew letters written differently at the end of a word. |
| English Ordinal | The English cipher with A=1 to Z=26. |
| Reverse Ordinal | The English cipher with A=26 to Z=1. |
| Full Reduction | The English cipher that cuts each letter to a single digit from 1 to 9. |
| Sumerian (cipher) | English Ordinal multiplied by 6. The name is a modern label. |
| Kabbalah | Jewish mystical tradition, in which gematria carries symbolic weight. |
Terms link to their pages: what is gematria, Hebrew, Greek, English.
Values calculated from the published letter tables on this site; worked examples checked by hand on 13 November 2026. Written by Muhammad Hanif. Last updated 13 November 2026. Gematria is a symbolic practice, not a prediction tool.
More terms
Cipher. A table that assigns a number to each letter. Isopsephy. The Greek practice of adding letter values, from the Greek for “equal pebbles”. Mispar hechrachi. The Hebrew name for the standard method. Notarikon. A traditional method that reads a word as an abbreviation of a phrase. Temurah. A traditional method that rearranges or substitutes letters; Atbash, Albam and Avgad are examples. Final letters. The five Hebrew letters (kaf, mem, nun, pe, tsadi) with a different shape at the end of a word. Reduction. Adding the digits of a number until one digit remains. Anagram. A rearrangement of the same letters; anagrams always have the same total in an additive cipher. Kabbalah. A body of Jewish mystical tradition in which letters and numbers play a role. Numerology. A separate, mostly modern tradition that gives symbolic meanings to digits. For the main entries, see what is gematria.