How gematria is calculated
One cipher, stated plainly โ and the large part we leave alone.
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 โ noticing that two phrases share a value, and asking what that closeness might be saying โ is the interpretive tradition, and that part is not arithmetic at all.
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 โ you can check our arithmetic by eye.
Five Hebrew letters take a different shape at the end of a word โ 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.
If your text has no Hebrew letters in it, Bokki does not guess a transliteration and hand you a Hebrew number โ 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.
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 โ we keep them on different pages and compute them with different code.
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 โ 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.