English Gematria Value Chart

The Full Table

Reading the Columns

Ordinal is the plain A=1 to Z=26 count and the safest default. Reverse runs the alphabet backwards, A=26 to Z=1. Pythagorean reduces each letter to 1-9, cycling A-I, J-R, S-Z. Sumerian is Ordinal multiplied by six. Jewish maps the Latin letters onto the Hebrew ladder, which is why it is the only column that reaches into the hundreds on a single letter.

Quick Sanity Checks

A few totals are worth memorising because they catch mistakes fast. The whole alphabet in Ordinal sums to 351. Any word in Pythagorean cannot exceed nine times its letter count. A Sumerian total is always divisible by six, so if yours is not, a letter was dropped. And a Jewish Gematria total in the low double digits means the word is very short or the wrong cipher was used.

Working Out Which Cipher a Number Came From

Suppose a source claims a five letter word totals 300. Ordinal caps out at 130 for five letters, so it cannot be Ordinal. Pythagorean caps at 45. Sumerian could reach it, and 300 is divisible by six, so that is a live candidate. Jewish Gematria could reach it easily. Two candidates, both testable in seconds with the calculator. This is the whole method, and it makes most unsourced numbers checkable.

Converting Between Ciphers Without Recalculating

Four of the five columns are related by arithmetic, so once you have one total you can derive the others without touching the letters again. This is quicker than recalculating, and it doubles as an error check.

Ordinal to Sumerian: multiply by six. Sumerian to Ordinal: divide by six. Ordinal to Reverse: subtract the Ordinal total from 27 times the letter count. A five letter word with an Ordinal value of 60 must have a Reverse value of 135 minus 60, which is 75.

Only the Jewish column resists this. It is not a scaling of Ordinal but a remapping onto the Hebrew ranks, so it has to be calculated directly from the letters.

What Letter Frequency Does to Totals

English totals are not spread evenly across their possible range, and knowing the real shape saves time. The common letters sit low and middle: E is 5, T is 20, A is 1, O is 15, I is 9, N is 14. The rare letters carry the high values, with X at 24, Y at 25 and Z at 26.

The consequence is that ordinary English words average roughly 12 to 14 per letter in Ordinal rather than the 13.5 a uniform alphabet would give, and they rarely run much higher. A five letter word usually lands between 50 and 75. A total well outside that band means either an unusual word packed with rare letters, or a different cipher than the one you were told.

This is also why matches between unrelated words are so ordinary. The realistic range is far narrower than the theoretical one, so a few dozen totals absorb most of the vocabulary.

Choosing a Column for a Project

If you are calculating more than a handful of words, decide the cipher first and record that decision with your results. Ordinal is the sensible default: most widely published, easiest to verify by hand, and the one an unlabelled figure most likely used.

Choose Pythagorean only if you specifically want single digit results, and note that it discards information, since many different totals collapse to the same digit. Choose Reverse alongside Ordinal rather than on its own, since by itself it is simply harder to check. Choose Sumerian when you need to reproduce someone else's figures, remembering it carries nothing Ordinal does not.

Whatever you pick, publish the cipher name beside every number. A total without its cipher is not a result but a claim nobody can reproduce, and that single omission accounts for most of the disagreement in circulation.

Calculate a Word

Paste any word into the English gematria calculator to get all seven ciphers at once with the working shown, or see the other reference charts.