Slipknot Gematria: "Gematria (The Killing Name)"

Slipknot — the masked metal band from Des Moines, Iowa — released a track called Gematria (The Killing Name) on their 2008 album All Hope Is Gone. It is one of the few mainstream metal songs to put the word itself in the title, and searches for "slipknot gematria" almost always start there. This page is original commentary only: the band's lyrics are copyrighted, so nothing is reproduced here — read them on the band's official site or any licensed lyrics service.

Why a song named Gematria?

The title fits the band's long-running number imagery. Since their debut, Slipknot members perform in numbered jumpsuits — each musician is identified by a number (0 through 8 across the band's eras) alongside the mask — so names, numbers and identities are already fused in the band's aesthetic. A song title borrowing gematria, the practice of turning names into numbers, extends exactly that conceit into the track list. The band has not published an official explanation of the lyrics, and this page does not put words in their place.

The title's own numbers

Whatever the lyrics say, the title computes cleanly: "Slipknot" is 116 in English Ordinal and 696 in Sumerian (116 × 6); "The Killing Name" is 140 in Ordinal and 840 in Sumerian. The word "gematria" on its own is 74 in Ordinal — the number 74 page lists everything else that shares it. Run the full title or any variant spelling through the gematria calculator to see all nine ciphers with letter-by-letter workings.

From a song title to the actual practice

If the track is your first contact with the subject, the gematria definition page explains what the practice actually is, the gematria code shows how values get matched against names and dates, and the daily gematria news page applies the same letter-by-letter arithmetic to real headlines every day.