The number 111

Alef spelled out

אלף = 111 · פלא = 111 — the name of the letter alef, and the word for “wonder”, which are the same three letters in a different order.

Every Hebrew letter has a name that is itself a word, and can itself be summed. Alef’s is אלף: alef (1), lamed (30), pe (80). The same consonants read פלא, pele, “wonder” or “miracle”, and as elef, “thousand”, and in older Hebrew “ox” — the object the letter’s Phoenician ancestor pictured^{[1] Source: Hebrew alphabet}. Kabbalistic writers made much of the first letter concealing “wonder” and “a thousand” inside its name; the observation is exact, and like all good gematria it is an invitation to reflect rather than a claim about the world. In numeral form 111 is written קי״א, which spells nothing.

The square of the Sun

The second thread is arithmetic. Arrange the numbers 1 to 36 in a 6 × 6 square so that every row, column and main diagonal has the same sum, and that sum is 111; the whole square totals 666. Agrippa printed this square in 1533 as the planetary “table of the Sun”, noting that its six rows “produce 111, and the sum of all is 666”^{[2] 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”}. This is the historical origin of the pairing of 111 with 666 in Western occult literature — and it has nothing to do with letters. It is a property of the integers 1 to 36, and it would be true in any alphabet or none. (The 4 × 4 square of Jupiter has rows of 34; the 5 × 5 square of Mars, 65; the 7 × 7 square of Venus, 175.)

111 × 6 = 666

The third thread is the one that matters most for anyone reading modern gematria online. The cipher called Sumerian — “English gematria” on Gematrix — assigns A = 6, B = 12 … Z = 156: it is English Ordinal multiplied by six^{[3] Source: Gematria calculator}. Multiplication preserves equality, so every word with an English Ordinal value of 111 has a Sumerian value of 666, and vice versa. There is no second fact here; there is one fact, rescaled.

Words with Ordinal 111 are common, because 111 sits where eight-to-eleven-letter English words cluster. From this page’s fixed candidate list alone: New York, Santa Claus, Computer, Kissinger, Perfection, Corrupt, Sorceries, Witchcraft, Illusion, Necromancy, Mark of Beast. Each of these is quoted somewhere online as “equal to 666”. Each is equal to 111. The reader who knows that Sumerian is Ordinal × 6 sees at once that “Computer = 666” and “Santa Claus = 666” are statements about a rescaled table, not about computers or Christmas. The cipher comparison lists every such dependency among the English ciphers.

The angel number

Since the 2000s a separate belief has attached to repeated digits: that seeing 1:11 on a clock or 111 on a receipt is a message, with 111 conventionally read as “new beginnings” or “alignment”^{[4] Source: Angel number}. This is numerology of a recent kind^{[5] Source: Numerology}. It interprets the digit 1 and its repetition; no letter, word or text is involved. It is listed here so that a reader searching for 111 finds an accurate description of it, and so that it is not confused with the Hebrew alef, the magic square or the Sumerian rescaling — three older things that have exactly one property in common with it, the number.

111 in English ciphers

Fixed candidate list through all fourteen ciphers. Note where the hits fall.

Gematria 111: words that match

The 111 gematria matches below are computed from a fixed list of common words — never searched for hits — so the misses are shown alongside the matches. Try any word on the calculator to check a value of your own.

Every English Ordinal hit above reappears as a Sumerian 666 on the 666 page; the two lists are the same list. The Francis Bacon cipher misses all of them: it counts a capital as 27–52, so a capitalised word sums 26 higher than in Ordinal (Computer = 137, computer = 111) — a reminder that in that cipher case matters.

Reading 111 honestly