What Is Gematria? A Complete Guide

Gematria is a system of assigning a numerical value to a word or phrase by adding together the numeric value of each of its letters, based on an alphabet in which every letter also functions as a number. It originated in the Hebrew textual tradition, where it has been used for over two thousand years to compare and connect words in the Torah and Talmud that share the same total value — and it has since been adapted into Greek (isopsephy) and, in modern times, into English.

How gematria actually works

Unlike English, where letters and numbers are entirely separate symbol systems, the Hebrew and Greek alphabets never developed distinct numeral characters — instead, each letter of the alphabet was simply reused to represent a number, the way Roman numerals reuse Latin letters (I, V, X, L...). This means that every word written in Hebrew or Greek was, quite literally, always also a number. Gematria is the practice of taking that number seriously: adding up a word's letter-values and treating the resulting total as meaningful, especially when two unrelated words share the exact same value.

The most famous example is the Hebrew word חי ("chai," meaning "life"), whose two letters — ח (Chet = 8) and י (Yod = 10) — sum to 18. That single calculation is why the number 18, and multiples of it, became symbolically tied to the idea of life in Jewish culture, and why monetary gifts are traditionally given in multiples of 18. You can see this and other results yourself in our Hebrew gematria calculator.

The three major gematria traditions

• Hebrew gematria — the original and most textually developed tradition, with multiple recognized calculation methods (Standard, Ordinal, Full, Reduced, and more), used extensively in Torah and Talmud study and in Kabbalah.
• Greek isopsephy — the equivalent practice using the Greek alphabet, historically older in the written record and famous for its role in debates over the "number of the beast" (666) in the Book of Revelation.
• English gematria — a modern adaptation (English letters have no inherent numeral function) built mostly around the simple A=1...Z=26 count and its variations, popularized by 20th- and 21st-century numerology and internet "decode" communities.

Gematria vs. numerology

Gematria and numerology share the same underlying mechanic — summing letter values — but they come from different traditions and serve different purposes. Gematria is fundamentally a method of textual analysis, applied to specific written words to find connections between them. Numerology (Pythagorean, Chaldean, Life Path numbers) applies a similar letter-summing technique to personal names and birthdates to derive claims about character or destiny. See our full breakdown in Gematria vs. Numerology.

Is gematria taken seriously?

Within Jewish textual scholarship, gematria has a long and legitimate history as one of several traditional tools (alongside allegory, wordplay, and close reading) for drawing connections within sacred text — though even within that tradition it has always been treated as suggestive rather than probative. Outside of religious and historical study, gematria has no standing in mainstream science as a predictive or evidentiary method, and its modern use for "decoding" news events or predicting outcomes is widely regarded as pseudoscience. We go into this distinction honestly in Is Gematria Real, or Pseudoscience?

Try it yourself

The fastest way to understand gematria is to calculate a few words yourself. Try our full gematria calculator, which computes 16 English, Hebrew, and Greek ciphers at once and explains exactly what each one means as you go.