6 ms·

So what are both "ionic" and "tonic" in the same dictionary for a human readable entropy library?

Taek 9y ago
Good question. I'm the author of that library and I can say I just borrowed the word list from another project. Luckily, that library only cares that you get the first three letters of each word correct, so we can update the word to 'tonsil' or 'tongue' without breaking compatibility.
- Scaevolus 9y ago
  Using ngram or part-of-speech data could create better mnemonics: https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/ https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/ Filtering the list to require a minimum edit distance of 2 or 3 would be quite easy, too!
codys 9y ago
Ya, it seems like trying to choose words that are hard to mistake for each other (high lev distance, and perhaps also considering letter similarity) would be a very good idea for selecting a dictionary like this. I wonder what the original process was?
tonyhb 9y ago
EFF has a new wordlist which can be used for things like this. It focuses on phonetic and spelling differences across each word so that this doesn't happen, plus it prevents words from "duplicating" when you combine them (ie the two words `in put` and `input` being the same). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-passphrases https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...
- r00fus 9y ago
  This is awesome. I had no idea my EFF money was doing great things like this in addition to fighting for net freedom :)
- StavrosK 9y ago
  That's fantastic. My only complaint is that none of the lists' lengths are a power of two, but that's easily fixed by truncating one.
- rspeer 9y ago
  Nice! As I started reading about it, I idly wondered if they talked to Marc Brysbaert, who is very serious about researching which words people know. And the answer is yes, they did.
markc 9y ago
I've used PGP Words - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list - "which are carefully chosen for their phonetic distinctiveness". There is also a "parity" feature to catch simple errors. My application was pass phrases to be read over the phone, but it seems generally useful whenever you want to avoid confusing two words in the set.

Taek 9y ago

Good question. I'm the author of that library and I can say I just borrowed the word list from another project. Luckily, that library only cares that you get the first three letters of each word correct, so we can update the word to 'tonsil' or 'tongue' without breaking compatibility.

Scaevolus 9y ago
Using ngram or part-of-speech data could create better mnemonics: https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/ https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/ Filtering the list to require a minimum edit distance of 2 or 3 would be quite easy, too!

codys 9y ago

Ya, it seems like trying to choose words that are hard to mistake for each other (high lev distance, and perhaps also considering letter similarity) would be a very good idea for selecting a dictionary like this. I wonder what the original process was?

tonyhb 9y ago

EFF has a new wordlist which can be used for things like this. It focuses on phonetic and spelling differences across each word so that this doesn't happen, plus it prevents words from "duplicating" when you combine them (ie the two words `in put` and `input` being the same). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-passphrases https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...

r00fus 9y ago
This is awesome. I had no idea my EFF money was doing great things like this in addition to fighting for net freedom :)
StavrosK 9y ago
That's fantastic. My only complaint is that none of the lists' lengths are a power of two, but that's easily fixed by truncating one.
rspeer 9y ago
Nice! As I started reading about it, I idly wondered if they talked to Marc Brysbaert, who is very serious about researching which words people know. And the answer is yes, they did.

markc 9y ago

I've used PGP Words - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list - "which are carefully chosen for their phonetic distinctiveness". There is also a "parity" feature to catch simple errors. My application was pass phrases to be read over the phone, but it seems generally useful whenever you want to avoid confusing two words in the set.