Two things that work together

Count the passwords you type from memory. Two or three, probably: the laptop, the phone, maybe one account you sign into everywhere. Now count the accounts you have. A password manager is an app that keeps all of them in one locked file. One of the companies that sells them puts the average at 168, which is a self-interested number for them to publish, but nobody seriously argues it is under a hundred. Whatever your real number is, you are not inventing that many passwords. Nobody is. They come from somewhere, and for most people that somewhere is a handful of passwords used over and over. Source: NordPass, 2024

Be honest with me: you reuse the same password on most of your online accounts, don't you? If I am right, you probably have no idea how much risk that carries.

A password you invented is a password somebody else can guess. Not by hand. There are programs that try millions of candidates one after another, and they do not begin at aaaa and work through every variation in order. They begin with lists of the passwords people actually choose, which open at 123456. Then they work through word lists: every word in the language, plus names, teams, bands and films. Each one gets tried with the obvious disguises too. A capital in front. A digit and a symbol on the end. An o written as a zero. P@ssw0rd!23 is not a clever password; it is the first page of the playbook. Source: the most common passwords, NordPass

Reusing one is worse, and it is the danger people wave off. It takes no guessing at all. When a company is breached, the email-and-password pairs it loses are tried automatically against hundreds of other sites, and every account that shared that password opens. That costs the attacker almost nothing, and it is the same work whether ten accounts match or ten thousand do. How strong the password was does not come into it. Twenty characters you used twice is twenty characters somebody else already has. And nobody is attacking you personally: you are a line in a list of millions, and the list gets replayed for years after the breach that produced it.

Where you keep them matters as much, and none of the usual places is locked: a notes app, a spreadsheet, a text file on the desktop, an email to yourself. Anything that can read your files can read your passwords, and the malware that steals passwords goes looking for exactly those files. In Verizon's 2025 breach data, more than half of ransomware victims had their passwords sitting in stolen logs before the attack even started. Source: Verizon DBIR 2025

So there are two things to fix, and this page does the smaller one. It makes the two or three passwords you keep in your head, and they come out as random words, like ridge-dolphin-sober-mango-piano. Nobody chose them, including you. That is the whole trick.

For all the others, use a password manager. It invents a different password for every site and remembers all of them, so you never have to. Bitwarden is free and open source, KeePassXC keeps everything on your own disk if you would rather avoid the cloud, and 1Password and Proton Pass are fine too.

You can use this page for those too. Generate a passphrase here, paste it into the manager as that site's password, and let the manager remember it from then on. It is worth doing for the accounts you sometimes type by hand: a TV, a games console, a phone with no autofill. Forty random characters on a TV remote is a punishment; six words is not. For everything else, the manager's own generator is fine, since you will never see those passwords anyway.

Does that not put everything behind one password? It does. One password you actually remember beats a hundred you recycle. The file the manager keeps is locked with it, so a thief who steals the file still has to guess it. All the weight lands on that one password, which is what the rest of this page is about.

What this looks like when it goes wrong

None of those three is theoretical. Four that are worth knowing about:

• RockYou, 2009 A company called RockYou kept 32 million passwords in plain text and lost every one of them in a single break-in. The list of what people had actually chosen became rockyou.txt, which ships with Kali Linux and is still the first thing a cracking tool reaches for. Passwords picked in 2009 are the opening guesses aimed at you today.
• 23andMe, 2023 Nobody broke into 23andMe. Attackers signed in as roughly 14,000 people, one account at a time, using passwords those people had already used on sites that were breached earlier. Once inside, a profile-sharing feature reached data belonging to about 6.9 million people. The company later agreed to pay $30 million to settle. No exploit and no clever code: fourteen thousand front doors, opened with keys that were already lying around.
• Dropbox, 2012 One employee used his LinkedIn password at work too, LinkedIn was breached, and 68 million Dropbox account records left the building behind that single password.
• Snowflake, 2024 Nothing was guessed here either. Attackers used passwords that malware had quietly collected from people's own computers, some of it running since 2020, and signed into about 165 companies' cloud accounts. Ticketmaster alone lost 560 million customer records.

Two of those four were reuse and nothing else. The other two never involved guessing anybody's password. RockYou handed the guesses to everyone who came after it, and the Snowflake attackers read the answers off people's own laptops.

In the same Verizon report, stolen passwords come first on the list of ways in, for the second year running.

The manager is what ends reuse. Every site gets a different password and you never have to recall any of them, which takes the two reuse cases above off the table. What it cannot do is protect the password that opens the manager, because that one cannot be stored inside it. The key does not fit in the box it locks, and your computer login and your phone sit in the same position. That leaves two or three passwords that have to be memorable and hard to guess at once. People usually settle that with a pet's name and a year. Random words settle it the other way, and that is the only reason this page sits beside the advice to install a manager rather than instead of it.

What to do today:

1. Install a password manager.
2. Make its master password here, with six words. Write it on paper until you know it by heart, then destroy the paper.
3. Let the manager replace your reused passwords a few sites at a time. Start with your email, then anything with money in it.

Words, or random characters?

Your password manager can invent xK7#pLm2$vQ9 as easily as this page invents six words, and for every password it types for you, that is the better answer. It is shorter, and you never have to look at it.

The few you type yourself are a different problem. Six words from this page is worth the same as 12 of those characters, drawn the same way, by the same kind of random number generator. Neither is guessable. Only one of them can be held in your head, read out to somebody over the phone, or typed on a TV remote without three attempts. It costs you more keystrokes and saves you the lookup.

And there is one password no manager can make for you, whichever generator you like: the one that opens the manager. It has to exist before the vault does, and it cannot be kept inside the thing it unlocks. Your computer login and your phone are in the same position.

Some managers offer a passphrase mode of their own, and it is a good one. Use it if you have it. This page shows you the arithmetic rather than a setting, and it works before you have installed anything at all.

How many words should I pick?

Six, unless you have a reason to choose otherwise. That is where this page starts, and it is what the people who invented this method recommend for anything you would call important.

Five is still plenty, so take it if six feels like too much to hold in your head. Four is where it stops being safe, which is why the slider will not go there.

That floor moved while I was building this. I had it at six words and dropped it to five only after working out the table below. Five words survives every row there that stores a password properly, by thousands of years. Four does not last a quarter of an hour against the top row. That is the whole reason for the line.

How long an attack actually takes

Read a row like this. A company you have an account with is breached. The attacker takes the file with everyone's passwords in it, then guesses at yours around the clock on rented machines. How long that takes depends on how carefully the company stored that file, and the gap between careful and careless is enormous.

The first row is a company that stored passwords badly. Every row under it did something to slow a thief down, and the further down you read the more it did. Against all of them, five words holds for thousands of years or longer. Four words holds the careless row for thirteen minutes. That is the entire argument for the floor being five.

What “bits of entropy” means

Think of dice. One die has six faces, two dice have 36 combinations, three have 216. Bits are that same idea in a different unit: every bit doubles the number of possibilities. Ten bits is about a thousand, twenty bits is about a million, and thirty is about a billion.

Each word you add multiplies that pool by the whole length of the list. That is what the second line of the readout is for: 12.925 bits per English word. One more word buys more than any amount of punctuation.

Nothing is saved, and you can verify that

The phrase is made inside your browser and never sent to me. It is not in my server logs, not in my analytics, and not in anything sitting between you and this page, because it never travelled.

Open your developer tools, watch the network tab, and press the button. Nothing goes out, and that takes ten seconds to check rather than my word. What does load, before you press anything, is what every page here loads: the wordlist files, a stylesheet and icons from a CDN, and the analytics that counts the visit. None of them is ever sent a phrase, because the phrase is made after all of that and stays in the tab.

Your settings — word count, separator, language — are kept in this browser's local storage so the page remembers them. The passphrase itself is never written there.

The wordlists are public on purpose

Anyone can download both lists, and that takes nothing away. The strength is in the dice, not in keeping the list secret. There are 7776 words per language, and every one has exactly the same chance of being picked. If hiding the list were what kept you safe, the safety would be imaginary.

Why the Portuguese words have no accents

The Portuguese list is written without accents: coracao, not coração. When you save one, copy and paste it rather than retyping. And if it is a phrase you will type from memory, remember there are no accents in it. Type the accented spelling and it will not match what you saved, even though the two look identical on screen.

What it deliberately will not do

There is no button to add a capital letter, a digit or a symbol. Those rules are the reason Password123! satisfies almost every password policy in the world and still appears hundreds of thousands of times in lists of breached passwords.

The reasoning in full, with the measurements behind it: Weak Passwords and Validators: Why Django's Four Defaults Accept a Password Seen 295,389 Times in Breaches