How to Calculate Gematria (Step by Step)

To calculate gematria, pick a cipher, replace each letter of your word with that cipher's value, and add the values together. That is the entire method - the remaining decisions are which cipher to use and what to do with the total. This guide works one word all the way through by hand, then shows how to do the same thing with the calculator.

Step 1: Pick a cipher

A cipher is the letter-value table. If you are starting out, use English Ordinal: each letter is its alphabet position, A=1 through Z=26. It is the baseline that most gematria researchers calculate first. (Working with Hebrew or Greek text? Use the native ciphers - see the Hebrew gematria guide.)

Step 2: Convert the letters and add

Take the word "decode". In Ordinal:

D is the 4th letter, E the 5th, C the 3rd, O the 15th - add them and "decode" = 36. Spaces and punctuation are skipped; gematria only counts letters.

Step 3: Repeat in the other base ciphers

Most researchers calculate several ciphers and compare the full set of values. In Full Reduction every letter reduces to a single digit 1-9 (J=10 becomes 1, K=11 becomes 2, and so on):

And in Reverse Ordinal, the alphabet counts backwards (Z=1 … A=26):

So "decode" is 36 / 27 / 126 across three of the four base ciphers. Most practitioners record all four, then check additional ciphers like Sumerian when a phrase seems significant.

Step 4: Find the matches

After calculating a value, the next step is to compare it. You can search every phrase equal to 36 directly. For example, Jesus, cross, and occult all equal 74 in Ordinal.

Using the calculator instead

The gematria calculator runs your phrase through 20+ ciphers at once and searches tens of thousands of stored phrases for shared values as you type - the same method as above, automated. For background on how the numbers are interpreted, see What is Gematria? or the number lore in Gematria and the Bible.