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Leet Speak: also known as leet, leetspeak, leetspeek, l33t, or hakspeak, is a way of writing words by substituting numerals or special characters for some of the English letters. The term "leet" derives from "elite," which refers to hackers who were among the first to use it, and who elevated it to a sort of cult language. Text that combines letters and numerals is sometimes called Alphanumerish. Leet speak can be useful in constructing passwords that are easy for the originator to remember, but difficult to steal by means of dictionary attacks. One of the most common uses of leet speak is in spam. Although spam filtering programs have become good at detecting leet speak in subject lines and rejecting e-mail messages that contain it, they often have less success detecting it in e-mail text.