2025 Diceware Wordlist Update

An update for my Diceware wordlist was long overdue.

I've posted a new 2025 version of my wordlist to my GitHub repository. Compared to my previous list, the new one has fewer inappropriate words (for a passphrase) and significantly shorter words on average.

My last Diceware wordlist, which I based on a wordlist published by the EFF, was created in 2019. That wordlist averaged about 7 (6.98) characters per word. A seven-word passphrase (with ~90 bits of entropy) averaged about 55 characters including the spaces between words. The new version averages 5.48 characters per word, or 44 characters for a seven-word passphrase.

To improve the list I removed any words of 8 or more characters (of which there were 3,266!) and replaced them with short, 3-6 character common English words from hermitdave's FrequencyWords repo. This took a lot of manual review of the words — I think it'll again be a few years before I have the motivation to improve this wordlist again, if ever. A good portion of the new words could be added because I relaxed my 2019 "no plural versions of words" rule.

To more easily create passphrases containing uppercase, lowercase, digits, and special characters, I also created a separate wordlist, that, though adding a digit or special character after each word, has an even shorter average word length at 4.76 characters per word.

See my 2019 Diceware post for more background on Diceware passphrases.