Wordlists¶

The passphrases generated by diceware naturally depend on the set of words used, the wordlists.

diceware comes with some wordlists out-of-the-box, that might be a good choice for usual private use.

Warning

We do not use the diceware standard wordlist, but the long EFF wordlist (see below), because it is more secure and more comfortable to use.

Currently (v0.10) we provide the following lists:

de (7776/6^5 words)

A list of German words, suitable for use with dice. Generated with diceware-list based on wordlists from Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim and filtering blacklists. This list provides the prefix property.
de_8k (8192/2^13 words)

A longer list of German words, suitable for use with machines, nerds, and other binary-geared entities. Generated with diceware-list based on wordlists from Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim and filtering blacklists. This list provides the prefix property.
en_eff (7776/6^5 words, default)

This is the long EFF wordlist as published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in mid-2016 and used by default. They put real scientific effort into the creation of this list which might considerably ease the use of passphrases generated with it. When using real dice (or other six-based randomness generators) use is definitely recommended!

It was the first list in diceware that provided the prefix property. That means it contains no word which is a prefix of another word. Lists without this property might provide a slightly decreased entropy.
en_securedrop (8192/2^13 words)

We provide a hand-crafted en_securedrop wordlist provided by @Heartsucker. It contains 8,192 english words and phrases. This list is based on the diceware standard wordlist and extended to offer better memorizable words. Please see https://github.com/heartsucker/diceware for details. The name en_securedrop refers to the securedrop project.
en_adjectives (1296/6^4 words)

A list of english adjectives. This list is relatively short and should be used together with other lists – for instance the en_nouns list – to provide a sufficient security level. List provided from the NaturalLanguagePasswords project.
en_nouns (7776/6^5 words)

A list of english nouns. Can be used together with other lists – for instance the en_adjectives list to form natural language phrases. List provided from the NaturalLanguagePasswords project.
pt-br (7776/6^5 words)

A list of brazilian portugese words, carefully crafted by @drebs. This list contains no overshort words. It also provides the prefix property.

You can pick wordlists to use with the -w or --wordlist option. Lists with 7776 words are made for six-sided dice (7776 = 6^5) while lists with 8192 (2^13) words are made for machines and 2-sided coins.

You can also select several wordlists at once. In that case each “word” of the generated passphrase consists of one word from each of the lists in the order given.

Example:

$ diceware -w en_adjectives en_nouns -n 2 -d '-'
lax-toast-strong-reason

We get two “words” (lax-toast and strong-reason) each consisting of a leading adjective and a trailing noun. If you’d prefer the Yoda style, you could change that order:

$ diceware -w en_nouns en_adjectives -n 2 -d '-'
grains-honest-oxidant-happy

Ich such term (like oxidant-happy) provides an entropy of about 23 bits.

Retired Wordlists¶

Some wordlists have been removed from diceware, because they contained bad language and words, users might be uncomfortable with.

en (8192 words, removed in v0.10)

The so-called 8k wordlist from Mr. Reinhold as published on http://diceware.com/. It was something like the canonical wordlist for use with binary-geared entities like computers or nerds.
en_orig (7776 words, removed in v0.10)

This is the diceware standard wordlist as provided by Mr. Reinhold. Something like the canonical list in former times. There are now considerable alternatives.

None of these lists provide the prefix property. They also provide overshort terms, i.e. words that are so short, that they can lead to passphrases that are easier to break by checking all char combinations than to try all combinations of words in the wordlist.

Add Own Wordlists¶

You can use any wordlist you like. Simply give the filename and it will be used:

$ diceware mywordlist.txt
HiHelloHelloHiHiHi

You can even pipe-in dynamic wordlists. Just use the dash - as filename:

$ cat mywordgenerator.sh | diceware -
HiHiHelloHiHiHello

for instance.

Of course you have to give the filenames of your files with each call to diceware.

But, if you want to store a wordlist persistently, you can do so too.

The wordlists we offer for use with diceware are all stored in a single folder. The exact location is output by --help at the very end:

$ diceware --help
...
Wordlists are stored in /some/path/to/folder

Just put your own wordlists into this folder (here: /some/path/to/folder) and rename the file to something like wordlist_MY_SPECIAL_NAME.txt. Afterwards you can pick your wordlist by running:

$ diceware -w MY_SPECIAL_NAME

diceware will use this file of yours then to create a passphrase. Please note that diceware only accepts files that are named like:

wordlist_NAME.txt

or:

wordlist_OTHER_NAME.asc

I.e. we expect wordlist_ at the beginning and some filename extension like .txt at the end. Furthermore names must not contain funny characters. In fact we accept regular letters, dashes, numbers, and underscores only. Files that do not follow these naming convention are ignored.

A list of all available wordlist names can also be retrieved with --help. See the --wordlist explanation.

Plain Wordlists¶

Out of the box, diceware supports plain wordlists, PGP-signed wordlists, and numbered wordlists. Plain wordlists look like this:

termone
termtwo
anotherterm

Each line in such a file is considered a word of the wordlist. Empty lines are ignored.

Whitespaces are allowed if they are not at the beginning or end of a line, stripped off otherwise.

Numbered Wordlists¶

Numbered wordlists contain numbers in each line, telling a sequence of dice rolls like so:

11111    aterm
11112    anotherterm
...

diceware detects such lines and in this case extracts aterm and anotherterm as wordlist entries.

Apart from simple digits written next to each other, diceware also accepts numbers separated by dashes like this:

1-1-1-1-1   aterm
1-1-1-1-2   anotherterm

which is handy when working with wordlists for dice with more than 9 sides.

PGP-signed Wordlists¶

PGP-signed wordlists are wordlists (ordinary or numbered ones), that have been cryptographically signed with PGP or GPG. They look like this:

and are normally stored with the .asc filename extension. Signed wordlists can be verified to detect changes, although this is not automatically done by diceware.

Warning

Diceware does not automatically verify PGP-signed files.