Septenary Gematria Calculator

What Septenary is

Septenary (“of seven”) gives each English letter a value from 1 to 7. The values rise through the first seven letters, A–G = 1–7, then fall through the next six, H–M = 6–1; the pattern repeats for N–T and U–Z.

It is one of the smaller English tables — only Chaldean has a comparably narrow range — and its defining feature is not the size of the numbers but the shape of the table: two identical halves, each a palindrome. That shape is the reason it exists, and the reason to be careful with it.

The table

Live examples: seven = 22 · Septenary = 35 · love = 14 · Jesus = 27 · God = 13.

The symmetry, and what follows

Two properties fall straight out of the construction.

• Each half is a mirror. A = M = 1, B = L = 2, C = K = 3, D = J = 4, E = I = 5, F = H = 6, G = 7. The same holds for N–Z around T.
• The halves are identical. A = N, B = O, C = P … M = Z. Any word and the word obtained by shifting each letter thirteen places (a ROT13 transformation) have the same Septenary value: ABC = 6 · NOP = 6 · GHM = 14 · TUZ = 14.

The practical consequence is that Septenary is very crowded. Each value from 1 to 6 is carried by four different letters, and 7 by two, so the cipher distinguishes only seven classes of letter. A five-letter word can total at most 35 and typically lands between 12 and 25; shared values between unrelated words are the rule, not the exception. That does not make the table wrong — it is exactly as specified — but it should temper how much a Septenary match is asked to prove.

Marty Leeds and the seven

The cipher was introduced by Marty Leeds in Pi & The English Alphabet, a self-published series that reads the 26-letter alphabet as a numerological structure and finds seven at its centre: 26 splits into 13 and 13, and 13 letters fold symmetrically around their seventh^{[1] Source: Pi & The English Alphabet, vol. 1}. Leeds builds a good deal on the coincidences that follow — the letter values, the value of “God” and other words, relationships to π — and his videos gave the table a wide audience in the online gematria community. Gematrinator added it to its cipher list under the name Septenary, which is how most people now meet it^{[2] Source: Gematrinator calculator}; it also appears in later decoding literature alongside the four base ciphers^{[3] Source: Letters & Numbers}.

As with every table on this site, the provenance is stated plainly: this is a twenty-first-century construction with a clear author. It has no ancient or scriptural pedigree, and does not claim one.

Reading Septenary values

Use Septenary for what it is good at — seeing the seven-fold structure Leeds describes, and testing his claims for yourself with the arithmetic in front of you. When comparing two phrases, remember that the table has only seven distinct letter values and that ROT13-related words are automatically equal. For claims that need more discrimination, read the same phrase in English Ordinal (the second tile), where 26 distinct values make coincidences far rarer, and consult the accuracy page for how to weigh a match.