A Diceware Kit for Other Languages

Diceware passphrases are fairly easy to remember if you speak English. Speakers of other languages would find it helpful if there were Diceware lists available for their languages. Here are some instructions for people who wish to create such lists. All you really need is 7776 short words. From a security standpoint it doesn't matter what they are as long as they are all different. We belive that keeping the words as short as possible improves the likelihood that actual users will employ a passphrase with enough words for good security.

To that end we included in the original Diceware list many short character combinations that are not words, but are easy to remember. Such combinations are contained in the file dicewarekit.txt. It includes 992 letter and number strings, all 4 characters or less, including:

If you wish to follow this approach, here are suggested steps for doing so:

  1. Download the file dicewarekit.txt.
  2. If you wish to add letter combinations in your language that are not in the 26-character Roman alphabet, you of course may do so, but consider whether they will be available on all keyboards that your users will have.
  3. Get a list of the words in your language. You will need to add about 6784 words from your language. Exercise some judgement as to what is appropriate in your language. We suggest removing all offensive words.
  4. Open that list in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or AppleWorks
  5. You may want to add short abbreviations that would be familiar to speakers of your language and some ordinal numbers, if appropriate (We included "1st", "2nd", "3rd", ..., "100th" in the English list)
  6. Create a column that contains the length of each word
  7. Sort the spreadsheet by length
  8. Delete words with two or fewer letters (all one and two letter combinations are in dicewarekit.txt)
  9. Depending on the language, you may find that there are enough words if you only use 3, 4, 5 and 6 letter words. For some languages you many need seven letter words.
  10. Remove the most obscure of the longest words until your list is about 6850 words long. (You should have a few extra since there may be some words duplicated in dicewarekit.txt)
  11. Open the dicewarekit.txt file in your spreadsheet program
  12. Paste your language list at the end of the dicewarekit.txt list in one column
  13. Sort the column.
  14. Check for duplicates by adding a column that tests if the cell below equals the current cell [e.g. =IF(A2=A1,"xxxx","")] then sort on that column.
  15. Remove any duplicates
  16. Trim the list so it contains exactly 7776 words. Your list is now done. Congratulations!

To add the dice numbering, open the classic Diceware word list in your spreadsheet program and replace the English word list column with your word list.

To create an 8192 (2**13) word list, download the file diceware416.txt and add its contents to your list; then resort.

Finally, if you post your list on the Internet, be sure to let us know so we can add a link from the Diceware site.

Good luck!


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2001-5-8