Generate a Memorable Passphrase
Some secrets have to live in a human head: your password manager's master password, your disk encryption, the vault password you will need in five years. For those, a passphrase — several truly random words — beats any character soup, because it is both strong and rememberable. This generator picks words from the EFF Large Wordlist using cryptographic randomness, entirely in your browser.
The actual tool runs in our ad-free secure workspace — nothing on this page processes your file.
Open Passphrase Generator →What this tool does
- Generates passphrases by drawing words at random from the EFF Large Wordlist — 7,776 carefully chosen words, about 12.9 bits of entropy each.
- Uses the browser's CSPRNG for selection, the digital equivalent of rolling physical dice.
- Defaults to six words (≈77 bits of entropy), with options for more when the stakes are higher.
- Offers separators, capitalization, and added digits or symbols for sites with composition rules.
- Displays the entropy math openly, so you know exactly what a given length buys you.
- Runs fully locally — generated passphrases are never transmitted or stored.
Your privacy on this tool
Stays on your device
- Word selection happens on your device using cryptographically secure randomness.
- The wordlist ships with the page; no lookup or generation request goes to any server.
- Nothing you generate is logged, stored, or observable by us.
Reaches our server: nothing
This tool makes no upload. Your content is processed entirely in your browser.
How to use it
- Open the generator at /app/passphrase-generator.
- Choose the word count — six is the sweet spot for most master passwords.
- Pick a separator and any capitalization or digit options a picky form requires.
- Generate a few until one sticks in your mind — regenerating costs no security, since each result is independently random.
- Practice typing it a few times, and store a backup copy somewhere safe (an encrypted file or a written note in a secure place).
Common uses
- Setting the master password for a password manager — the one secret that guards all the others.
- Choosing a password for encrypted files and vaults you will need to unlock years from now.
- Full-disk encryption passwords typed at every boot, where muscle memory matters.
- A Wi-Fi password you can read aloud to guests without spelling out line noise.
- Shared team secrets that must be communicated verbally or remembered by more than one person.
Supported formats
- 4–10 words from the EFF Large Wordlist; configurable separators, capitalization, digits, and symbols
Works in all modern browsers on desktop and mobile; generation is instant and offline-capable once loaded.
Limitations & security notes
Limitations
- The strength math only holds for randomly selected words — picking six words yourself, or swapping one 'to make it memorable', quietly collapses the entropy.
- Six words is more typing than a manager-autofilled password; passphrases earn their keep where humans type, not where software does.
- Some sites enforce maximum lengths or demand symbols; the add-ons handle most of it, but truly hostile password policies may force a character password instead.
- SecretPNG is in beta and has not been independently audited.
Security notes
- The security lives entirely in random selection from 7,776 words: each word adds ~12.9 bits, so six words reach ≈77 bits — far beyond practical brute force even when the attacker knows the exact wordlist and method.
- Knowing the method does not help the attacker; that is the point of Kerckhoffs's principle, and it is why publishing the wordlist costs nothing.
- Never reuse a passphrase across purposes — the master password and the disk password should not be the same six words.
- A passphrase used for file encryption here is stretched further by PBKDF2 (600,000 iterations), compounding the attacker's cost per guess.
- Regenerate freely until one is memorable; rejecting outputs you dislike does not meaningfully reduce entropy.
Frequently asked questions
- Why are random words stronger than a 'complex' password like Tr0ub4dor&3?
- Because entropy comes from unpredictability, not visual complexity. Substitution patterns (0 for o, @ for a) are the first thing cracking tools try, so they add almost nothing. Six truly random words from a 7,776-word list yield about 77 bits — vastly more than a mangled dictionary word — while being far easier to remember and type correctly.
- What is the EFF Large Wordlist and why use it?
- It is a list of 7,776 words curated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation specifically for passphrase generation: common enough to spell reliably, distinct enough to avoid confusion, free of profanity and easily mistaken pairs. The count matters — 7,776 is 6^5, matching five dice rolls per word in the classic Diceware method this digitizes.
- Is 77 bits actually enough?
- For anything protected by a decent system, yes — 2^77 guesses is beyond realistic attack, and when the passphrase feeds a key-derivation function like PBKDF2 with 600,000 iterations, each guess costs the attacker meaningful compute on top. For the truly paranoid or long-horizon secrets, seven or eight words push past 90–103 bits at the cost of one more word to remember.
- Doesn't it weaken the passphrase that attackers know the wordlist?
- No. The entropy calculation already assumes the attacker has the wordlist, the word count, and the method — everything except which words the dice chose. That assumption-of-full-knowledge is how honest cryptographic strength is always measured. Secrecy of the method adds nothing; randomness of the selection adds everything.
- Should I write my passphrase down?
- For a master password or disk password: yes, once, on paper, stored somewhere genuinely secure — many people use a sealed envelope in a safe or deposit box. The realistic threat to these secrets is forgetting them, not burglars reading them. Just never store it in plaintext on the device it unlocks.
Related tools
Last reviewed: 2026-07-14Open Passphrase Generator
SecretPNG is in beta and has not been independently audited. Security status.