Large number of negative sentiment words

[chrisuehlinger-techslice]

Does the EFF list have a bias towards words with negative sentiment? I notice that quite frequently I get a word or two in a passphrase that makes it feel... "icky", or which raise eyebrows if I share the password with people. Nothing offensive, just words like "unhinged" or "abhorrent"

Some of this is definitely just random chance and the nature of the English language. But I'm also wondering if the EFF's word-choosing process (or some post-processing on your end) favors the "more-prefixed" versions of words, which would definitely result in a lot of words the begin with un-, de-, anti-, etc. and which would definitely result in a list with more "negative sentiment" words.

None of this is a big problem, more just an idle curiousity.

[dmuth]

Hmm--that had never occurred to me. For me it's usually just a copy and paste of the generated password. I don't know anyone who works for the EFF, but if I ever cross paths, I'll inquire.

I created a new label called "EFF" to track this Issue, because it's the first of its kind, which is kinda neat!

Also, I have to caution against sharing passwords for any reason, because of potential for eavesdropping, as well as the password being in someone's stored messages somewhere. I know 1Password will let you share a password with another person securely, and I would be surprised if BitWarden didn't have similar functionaity.

I'll keep this Issue open until I can find out some way or the other if the content of the words had anything to do with their selection.

-- Doug

[blanchardjeremy]

If you're curious, you can read a bit about the thinking that went into the EFF word list here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-passphrases

(I found it while doing a bunch of research to build my passphrase generator: https://strongphrase.net/)

Pure speculation: If you remove negative sentiment words, you have to increase the number of harder-to-remember or harder-to-spell words to get the same amount of entropy. A LOT of words would fall in the negative sentiment category which would mean that the resulting pass phrases would be harder to remember/type.