How safe it is to use 4 letter shortened words?

Version 2

Last scraped

Edited on 03/05/2025, 07:31:39 UTC

I generated new wallet yesterday on ~~Electric~~Electrum and noticed something funny. The other day I saw article which states that every BIP39 word can be shortened to just four letters when writing down seed phrase.

So it surprised me when Electrum generated some seed words that had more than one possibilities when writing down word (the words were GROUp - GROUnd and COMMit - COMMon.

Now I understand that Electrum seed is not BIP39 compatible but still it can lead to confusion and some people can get confused if they store seed in shortened format in belief they can restore wallet 100% accurately.

The good thing is that out of 12 seed words only 2 were those that had first four letters same as other seed words, so there is only 4 different combinations to try out.

Edit. Edited Electric -> Electrum, missed that autocorrect

Version 1

Scraped on 26/04/2025, 07:36:43 UTC

I generated new wallet yesterday on Electric and noticed something funny. The other day I saw article which states that every BIP39 word can be shortened to just four letters when writing down seed phrase.

So it surprised me when Electrum generated some seed words that had more than one possibilities when writing down word (the words were GROUp - GROUnd and COMMit - COMMon.

Now I understand that Electrum seed is not BIP39 compatible but still it can lead to confusion and some people can get confused if they store seed in shortened format in belief they can restore wallet 100% accurately.

The good thing is that out of 12 seed words only 2 were those that had first four letters same as other seed words, so there is only 4 different combinations to try out.

Original archived How safe it is to use 4 letter shortened words?

Scraped on 26/04/2025, 07:31:27 UTC

I generated new wallet yesterday on Electric and noticed something funny. The other day I saw articlewhich states that every BIP39 word can be shortened to just four letters when writing down seed phrase.

So it surprised me when Electrum generated some seed words that had more than one possibilities when writing down word (the words were GROUp - GROUnd and COMMit - COMMon.

Now I understand that Electrum seed is not BIP39 compatible but still it can lead to confusion and some people can get confused if they store seed in shortened format in belief they can restore wallet 100% accurately.

The good thing is that out of 12 seed words only 2 were those that had first four letters same as other seed words, so there is only 4 different combinations to try out.