Gematria

Gematria is giving a word or phrase numeric value.

What's strange is that gematria seems common in other languages but not in English. English seems to have relatively few numerical puns and very limited ability to convert words to numbers and numbers to words.

Goroawase

Goroawase refers to Japanese gematria, most commonly used for puns, jokes, and mnemonics.

• For the circle constant pi: 身一つ世一つ生くに無意味違約無く身文や読む
  • The goroawase is working overtime to make the digits of pi into a sentence
    • Usually 1 is not spelled out as ひとつ; very wasteful in terms of syllables
    • い for 5 feels odd. Typically い alone is 1, but here it's interpreted as the い in いつつ.

In Computer Science

In his talk How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!, Guy Steele uses a kind of programming gematria to save computer memory. Since computer commands have numerical value, he reinterprets instructions as numbers rather than saving a second copy of the number.

Created 2024-06-09.

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