Post
Topic
Board Electrum
Re: How safe it is to use 4 letter shortened words?
by
hd49728
on 27/04/2025, 10:51:02 UTC
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.
This issue only exists when you recover your wallet with Electrum and nc50lc shared an information with you that, it comes from old and current word lists.

If you use Electrum wallet software with newest version, you will not have this problem.

It is described in BIP39 word list.
Quote
The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39 wordlist (or ‘BIP39’ for short) is a standardized set of words for the recovery and backup of a bitcoin or cryptocurrency wallet.

Each word in the list is unique within the first four letters of each word, meaning no two words on the list share the same first four letters.

For instance, take the word “accident” as an example. Its first four letters are “acci”. If you look at the BIP39 word list, you will see that no other word begins with “acci”.

Some words are shorter than four letters, such as the word “act”. Other words are longer than four letters, such as “abstract”.

The important thing to understand is that any letter after the fourth one is not relevant to backing up and recovering your wallet.

There are different word lists for Electrum wallet in different languages.
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/tree/master/electrum/wordlist