I thought of something different sometimes ago, that apart from the passphrase, you could try to do some permutations and combinations on the private key of a wallet to generate another address and eventually get a wallet with funds. This is not what i would want to do though, because it's as good as saying that such person is a scammer, because you are looking forth to rip from where you did not sow.
My intention is also not to hack anyone. Just a curiosity.
One thing I saw a lot of people get wrong in this thread: wallets come with a predefined set of words. It's not random words from the dictionary. The words you can use are actually limited. Just look at the source code for popular wallets and you'll find a file like words.txt or something. So you'd be choosing words from there, not from the universal dictionary.