The EFF has published a great set of diceware wordlists and an informative diceware page. The wordlist can also be found in the EFF's eff_diceware repo on GitHub from which this repository is forked.
This repository contains a modified wordlist based on the EFF's 5-die "large" list.
The customized list replaces 3,609 words, including:
- words of 8 or more characters,
- hard-to-spell words,
- words with homophones,
- words that could make for unpleasant, unsavory, or politically insensitive passphrases,
- some compound words that might be difficult to remember as a single "word,"
- words with common alternative spellings,
- words containing non-alphabetic characters, and
- other words that seem out of place in a wordlist.
I've replaced most of the removed words with 3-6 character words from hermitdave's FrequencyWords repo.
The lower_upper_digit_special_6dice-2025.txt uses 6 dice, and includes lower-case, upper-case, digit, and special characters.
The benefit of this list is that a 7-word passphrase has (log(6^6)/log(2))*7 = 108.5 bits of entropy. A 7-word passphrase created with a regular 5-die wordlist would have only 90.5 bits of entropy.
An 8-word passphrase created with the 6-die list would have 124 bits of entropy, compared to 103.4 bits for a 5-die wordlist.
eff_large_wordlist.txt is in the original format of the repository, and is well-suited for use with dice to create passphrases.
eff_large_wordlist-2025.txt has an additional numbered column, and this particular file will not be updated in the future -- making it useful for encrypting a passphrase with one time pad as outlined in my blog post. (If this particular URL/filename is noted with the encrypted passphrase, you can be sure you're decrypting the passphrase correctly.)
lower_upper_digit_special-2025.txt uses only 3- and 4-character words, but includes upper-case characters, digits, and special characters.
lower_upper_digit_special_6dice-2025.txt similar to lower_upper_digit_special-2025.txt but uses 6 dice (see above "6-die" section for bits of entropy note).
eff_large_wordlist-2019.txt was the previous version of the customized list, which replaced 433 words from the original EFF list.
The original EFF diceware wordlist averaged 6.99 characters/word, or 62.92 characters (including separating spaces) for an 8-word passphrase.
eff_large_wordlist-2025.txt averages 5.48 characters/word, or 50.84 for an 8-word passphrase.
lower_upper_digit_special-2025.txt and lower_upper_digit_special_6dice-2025.txt average 4.76 characters/word, or 45.08 for an 8-word passphrase.
eff_large_wordlist-2019.txt averaged 6.98 characters/word, or 62.84 for an 8-word passphrase.
The wordlist file is distributed by the EFF under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
All other content in this repository is open source under the terms of the MIT License.