German Diceware Wordlist for Random Passphrases

A high-quality German wordlist for creating secure, random passphrases using the Diceware method.

The list contains 7,776 words in various formats. All words are carefully selected to be workplace-friendly, neutral, and suitable for professional environments — not vulgar, offensive, religious, or negatively connoted.

The words also meet these formal conditions:

• 4 to 8 characters long
• contains english letters only (no german special characters like umlauts)
• a known noun, verb or adjective in its basic form

What are passphrases anyway?

A Passphrase is a password made up of multiple words, such as:

correct horse battery staple

Passphrases are excellent passwords because they are easy to remember (for you) and hard to guess (for others):

Why you need a wordlist

A strong passphrase is made of truly random words — not just whatever pops into your head. If you pick the words yourself, chances are they’re not as random as you think. Names of pets, partners, or bands are easy to guess and will result in weak passphrases.

To create truly random and therefore secure passphrases, you should use either a passphrase generator or Diceware. Both methods require a list of words to pick words from. A typical diceware wordlist consists of 6^5 = 7,776 words.

Download

Just download the latest release in the desired format:

• wordlist-german.txt: original german wordlist with correct capitalization
• wordlist-german-lowercase.txt: lowercase version of the wordlist above
• wordlist-german-diceware.txt: the actual german diceware wordlist made from the lowercase wordlist

Where do all those words come from?

All words have been taken from the digital german dictionary DWDS:

DWDS – Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Das Wortauskunftssystem zur deutschen Sprache in Geschichte und Gegenwart, hrsg. v. d. Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, https://www.dwds.de/, abgerufen am 17.01.2022.