English Gematria Calculator

What English gematria is

English gematria is the practice of giving each of the 26 letters a number and summing them to find the value of a word. In its basic form — English Ordinal — the number is simply the letter’s position: A = 1, B = 2, … Z = 26.

Everything else on this page is a variation on that table. Full Reduction folds the alphabet into the digits 1–9 (so J, the tenth letter, becomes 1). Reverse Ordinal counts from the other end, Z = 1. Sumerian multiplies each ordinal value by six. Because the tables are simple, the calculator above shows all four at once and lets you see the arithmetic for any of them by selecting its row.

Two different things are called “English gematria”

This is the single most common source of confusion when comparing values between sites, so it is worth being explicit.

• On Gematrix, the column headed “English Gematria” is the ×6 table: A = 6, B = 12 … Z = 156. Its A = 1 table is headed “Simple Gematria”^{[3] Source: Gematria calculator}.
• On Gematrinator, in Zachary Hubbard’s Letters & Numbers, and on most other calculators, “English” or “English Ordinal” means A = 1 … Z = 26, and the ×6 table is called “Sumerian”^{[2] Source: Gematrinator calculator[1] Source: Letters & Numbers}.

So when someone says “Jesus is 444 in English gematria”, they are using the Gematrix label for the ×6 table (74 × 6 = 444). When someone says “Jesus is 74 in English gematria”, they mean English Ordinal. Both are correct under their own convention. This site avoids the bare label altogether and names each table.

The four English tables

English Ordinal

Full Reduction (Pythagorean)

Reverse Ordinal

Sumerian (×6)

The Reverse Full Reduction table, Chaldean, Septenary, Agrippa’s Latin (“Jewish”) and Francis Bacon ciphers are all in the results table above too; each has its own page linked from the calculator index.

A worked example

Take the word English, the default in the calculator. In English Ordinal:

E 5 + N 14 + G 7 + L 12 + I 9 + S 19 + H 8 = 74, which reduces 7 + 4 = 11 → 1 + 1 = 2.

In Full Reduction the same letters are 5 + 5 + 7 + 3 + 9 + 1 + 8 = 38; in Reverse Ordinal 22 + 13 + 20 + 15 + 18 + 8 + 19 = 115; in Sumerian 74 × 6 = 444. Notice that the Sumerian value never adds information: it is always exactly six times the ordinal value.

74 is the number people meet first in English gematria because so many resonant words land on it: Jesus = 74 · cross = 74 · Messiah = 74 · gematria = 74 · English = 74 · Lucifer = 74 · Muhammad = 74. With 26 letters and typical word lengths, most totals between about 40 and 120 are shared by hundreds of common English words, so such clusters are expected. The accuracy page puts numbers on how often matches occur by chance.

Where English gematria came from

Unlike Hebrew and Greek, whose letters served as everyday numerals for two thousand years, the Latin alphabet was never a numeral system: Romans counted with I, V, X, L, C, D and M^{[4] Source: Gematria}. The first table to give Latin letters Hebrew-style values was Cornelius Agrippa’s in 1533 — the ancestor of the “Jewish gematria” cipher, covered on its own page. The plain ordinal table (A = 1 … Z = 26) has no inventor; it is the obvious way to number an alphabet and appears in puzzles and schoolroom codes long before anyone called it gematria.

As a named practice, English gematria with its reduction and reverse variants belongs to the internet era. Gematrix (2000s) established the three-column Jewish / English / Simple layout that many later sites copied^{[3] Source: Gematria calculator}; Gematrinator and Zachary Hubbard’s 2018 book Letters & Numbers fixed the “four base ciphers” — Ordinal, Full Reduction, Reverse Ordinal, Reverse Full Reduction — that most decoding communities now assume^{[1] Source: Letters & Numbers[2] Source: Gematrinator calculator}. That recency is not a flaw, but it does mean English gematria has none of the textual tradition behind Hebrew gematria: there is no English equivalent of the Talmud’s Eliezer = 318.

How people use it

Three groups use English gematria for quite different purposes. Students of Hebrew or Greek scripture use it as a bridge — a way to see how letter-counting works before moving to the original languages. Numerologists use the Full Reduction table to derive single-digit “name numbers”. And a large online community uses all four base ciphers to look for shared values between names, phrases, dates and headlines.

Whatever your purpose, the same rule applies: state the cipher. “Jesus = 74” is a fact about English Ordinal; “Jesus = 444” is a fact about the ×6 table; “Jesus = 985” is Agrippa’s Latin. The calculator above lets you see all of them at once precisely so that the cipher is never left unsaid.