General Words¶

Often, when building an application, I’ve had occasions where I need to provide a nonce of some sort to a user. A nonce is some thing, whether number, or otherwise, that is used only once.

Goals¶

The over-arching goal was for this to be simple to use, and reasonably fast. Next, I wanted something that the average user would be able to enter manually with minimal risk. This ruled out a lot of the crazy mixed-case alphanumeric strings that are often used. Finally, a goal was to have a reasonably large number of permutations available so that the nonce, while not cryptographically strong, was strong enough for uses like registration, password reset, etc. For example, with the default word source, and a selection of three words, there are almost 19 billion permutations available. Presuming you’re doing any form of brute-force-attack prevention, this should be more than adequate.

Word Source¶

The list of words comes from the New General Service List v1.01. The original list, distributed in Excel format, is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. More information can be found on the website. From the base data, the following changes have been made:

The list was converted from Excel to a simple one-word-per-line text file format;

Only headwords were retained for clarity;

3. Supplemental words, such as months and numbers, were added; 3. Words less than 4 characters were removed.

Combined, a total of 2,668 headwords were retained.

Usage Example¶

The library is trivially easy to use:

>>> from generalwords import *
>>> get_word()
'tire'
>>> get_word()
'offense'
>>> get_words(n=3)
('climb', 'repair', 'force')

In the future, there may be more options, but not right now.

Not Done Yet¶

While the library will never be massively complicated, there’s a few things I’d like to have in the future:

Expand to other languages
Add additional word sources