How gematria is calculated
One cipher, stated plainly — and the large part we leave alone.
The idea
In Hebrew and in Greek, letters are also numbers. There was no separate set of digits, so every word already had a value, and reading meaning in those values is an old practice with a long life in Jewish learning. Gematria in its plainest form is arithmetic: take a word, look up each letter, add. What people do with the sum afterwards — noticing that two phrases share a value, and asking what that closeness might be saying — is the interpretive tradition, and that part is not arithmetic at all.
The cipher Bokki uses
Bokki uses Mispar Hechrachi, the standard or absolute value, which is the canonical cipher and the one most people mean when they say gematria without qualifying it. Alef through tet run 1 to 9, yod through tsadi run 10 to 90 in tens, and then qof, resh, shin and tav are 100, 200, 300 and 400. The page shows you every letter it counted and the value it gave, so the total is not a black box — you can check our arithmetic by eye.
What we do with final letters
Five Hebrew letters take a different shape at the end of a word — kaf, mem, nun, pe and tsadi. There is a variant cipher, Mispar Gadol, that gives those final forms the values 500 through 900. Bokki does not use it. In standard Mispar Hechrachi a final letter keeps its base value, so a final mem is 40 and not 600. This is the single most common place for two gematria calculators to disagree, so we are naming our choice rather than leaving you to guess which one you got. You can see the size of that choice in one word. Shalom is shin 300, lamed 30, vav 6 and a final mem, and we give that final mem 40, so the total is 376. Mispar Gadol would give it 600 and the same word would come to 936 — the first three letters identical in both readings, the last letter alone moving the total by 560. Across the five final forms the gap runs 480, 560, 650, 720 and 810, and a word that ends in any other letter gets the same total from either cipher, which is why this one decision is where the disagreement lives.
What happens with a Latin name
If your text has no Hebrew letters in it, Bokki does not guess a transliteration and hand you a Hebrew number — that would be inventing precision, and a name can be spelled several defensible ways in Hebrew. Instead it computes A=1 through Z=26 and labels the result English gematria on the screen, which is what it is: a twentieth-century extension of the Hebrew and Greek idea, not the tradition itself. If you want a Hebrew value, type Hebrew letters and you will get the Hebrew cipher.
This is not the same as your life-path number
Bokki has a separate numerology page, and the two are often bundled together in a way that muddles both. That one computes a Pythagorean life path: it reduces your birth month, day and year each to a single digit, adds them, reduces once more, and preserves the master numbers 11, 22 and 33 rather than collapsing them. It comes from Greek number philosophy by way of early-twentieth-century popularisers. Gematria comes from a Hebrew writing system in which letters simply were numbers. Same arithmetic instinct, different lineage — we keep them on different pages and compute them with different code.
What Bokki does not compute
The other ciphers. Mispar Gadol, Mispar Katan, Mispar Siduri, AtBash and the rest each give a different number for the same word, and we implement one, so treat any total here as belonging to Mispar Hechrachi and nothing else. Greek isopsephy, the same practice in the Greek alphabet, is not here either. Neither are notarikon or temurah, the acronym and letter-substitution methods that sit beside gematria. And we do not compute Kabbalistic attributions — the twenty-two letters mapped onto the sefirot and the paths of the Tree of Life. Kabbalah is a living tradition of study with teachers and centuries of argument inside it. Bokki adds letters. It does not read them the way someone inside that tradition would, and it will not pretend to.
Closing note — one word, two ciphers, 560 points apart
In short: Bokki implements exactly one cipher, Mispar Hechrachi, and names it on the screen rather than letting you assume it is the only way to count — the same word שלום totals 376 here and would total 936 under the variant Mispar Gadol, with the entire 560-point gap owed to one letter, the final mem, because that is the only place the two ciphers actually disagree. The other four letters that take a final shape carry the same kind of gap — kaf 480, nun 650, pe 720, tsadi 810 — and a word ending in any of the other twenty-two letters gets an identical total from both ciphers, because the disagreement lives in exactly five characters and nowhere else. None of that arithmetic extends past the one alphabet it was built for: a name typed in Latin script is not guessed into a Hebrew value — it becomes A=1 through Z=26, labelled "English gematria" on the screen because that is what it honestly is, a modern extension rather than the tradition. And Mispar Hechrachi is the only cipher in the code: no Mispar Katan, Mispar Siduri or AtBash, no Greek isopsephy, no notarikon or temurah, and no Kabbalistic mapping onto the sefirot — a total on this page belongs to exactly one counting system, stated once, so you never have to guess which one you got.