BIP39 Word List

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.

The only reason those letters are listed is to make it easier for our human brains to read them and possibly memorize our recovery phrase.

When you go to recover your wallet, you will almost never need to input the whole word. Instead, the wallet will autofill possible words based on what you have input so far.

You can see how that looks on a Ledger in the our recovery guide below:

You can also view the BIP39 wordlist in its entirety below and in every language.

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