Jewish Gematria Calculator

What “Jewish gematria” actually is

The cipher called “Jewish gematria” on Gematrix, Gematrinator and most other calculators is not Hebrew. It is a table of numbers for the Latin alphabet, published by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in 1533, applied to English words.

Agrippa built the table by analogy. Hebrew and Greek letters run through units (1–9), tens (10–90) and hundreds (100–900); he gave the Latin alphabet the same three-tier structure so that Latin names could be “computed” the way Hebrew and Greek ones were^{[1] Source: Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres), Book II, chapter XX: “What numbers are attributed to letters; and of divining by the same”}. When Gematrix put the table online in the 2000s beside its “English” and “Simple” columns, it labelled the column “Jewish Gematria”, presumably because the pattern of values looked Hebrew^{[2] Source: Gematria calculator}. The label has been copied ever since^{[3] Source: Gematrinator calculator}.

This site keeps the name because it is what people search for and what other calculators display, so that a value can be compared. But everywhere the cipher appears here it is marked Agrippa Latin, and this page exists to make the provenance clear. If you want the gematria of Hebrew words — the practice the Talmud and Kabbalah actually use — go to the Hebrew calculator.

The table

Read it in three tiers. Units: A–I = 1–9 (J is skipped). Tens: K 10, L 20, M 30, N 40, O 50, P 60, Q 70, R 80, S 90. Hundreds: T 100, U 200, X 300, Y 400, Z 500, then the three “extra” letters J 600, V 700 and W 900. Because half the alphabet is worth 100 or more, totals are large — a five-letter word can easily exceed 1,000 — and are dominated by whether it contains T, U, X, Y, Z, J, V or W.

Agrippa’s original, 1533

In Book II, chapter XX of De Occulta Philosophia, after giving the Hebrew and Greek numeral letters, Agrippa notes that the Roman alphabet is “wanting four to make up the number of twenty seven characters” and fills the gaps with “I and V simple consonants, as in the names of John and Valentine, and hi and hu aspirate consonants, as in Hierom and Huilhelme” — adding that the Germans write hu as “a double vv”^{[1] Source: Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres), Book II, chapter XX: “What numbers are attributed to letters; and of divining by the same”}. His printed list:

Note what is missing: there is no J, U or W as separate letters (the Latin alphabet of his day had 23), and I and V each appear twice — once as a vowel, once as a consonant — distinguished by how they sound in the word, not by spelling.

What modern calculators changed

• U = 200 and V = 700 by spelling. Agrippa’s single letter V was 200 when it sounded as a vowel and 700 as a consonant. Modern tables give every U 200 and every V 700 regardless.
• J = 600 by spelling. Likewise, Agrippa’s consonantal I (600) became the letter J, and every I is now 9. “Iesus” and “Jesus” therefore differ: Iesus = 394 · Jesus = 985.
• W = 900. Agrippa’s aspirate HV (900), which he himself compared to the German double-v, became W.
• 800 dropped. Agrippa’s HI (800) has no modern letter, so no single English letter is worth 800 in this cipher.

None of these changes is unreasonable — they are what you have to do to apply a 23-letter sound-based table to a 26-letter spelling-based alphabet — but they mean the modern cipher is an adaptation of Agrippa, not Agrippa. The Latin gematria page discusses his original in more depth.

Examples

Computed live: Jesus = 985 · Christ = 290 · God = 61 · love = 775 · gematria = 233 · Messiah = 233. The default word in the calculator, Jesus, is 985 because J alone contributes 600 and U another 200. Values in this cipher are so sensitive to those few high letters that words with none of them (God = 61, love = 775 because of the V) sit in a completely different range.

When you want real Hebrew gematria

If your interest is scripture, Talmud or Kabbalah, this is not the tool: those traditions count Hebrew letters, and the values of names like אליעזר (318) or משיח (358) cannot be reached through any English spelling. Use the Hebrew gematria calculator, which has an on-screen keyboard and the four classical methods described in the Jewish Encyclopedia^{[4] Source: Gematria}. If your interest is the online decoding community’s conventions — comparing English names and phrases across ciphers — this page and the decoder are the right place.