Passphrase Name Generator

How the Password-style Passphrase Name Generator (Word-word-word) works

Passphrase name generator: choosing a name that fits

Three ordinary words joined together became a naming convention because they solve a problem that a single word and a random string both fail at: a name that a person can read aloud over the phone, type without a mistake, remember for the length of a meeting, and that will almost never collide with anyone else's, since three words from lists of forty give sixty-four thousand combinations and a colour, an animal and an object give eight thousand distinct pictures. Video-call links, ephemeral environments, container and host names, Wi-Fi networks, guest accounts, usernames on services where the good ones are taken, temporary file names and support tickets all use the shape, and the differences between them are only the shape of the words and the separator. The adjective-noun form, copper-heron, is the shortest, the shape of container and branch names; the adjective-noun-noun form, copper-heron-lantern, is the meeting-link convention, sayable and picturesque; the adjective-adjective-noun form, quiet-swift-badger, reads as a nickname; the colour-animal-object form, red-falcon-lantern, is the most memorable because it makes a picture; the noun-noun-noun form, river-anvil-meadow, is closest to a real passphrase; and the adjective-noun-number form, swift-badger-42, is the username and hostname convention, where a number breaks the tie. The separator select gives a hyphen for URLs and hostnames, a dot for handles and some usernames, spaces with capitals for a title or a spoken name, CamelCase for an identifier, an underscore for a filename or a database, and no separator in lower case for a service that forbids punctuation; the words are the same in every case, so the same name can be generated in the form each system wants.

The words are ordinary, positive, concrete English chosen to be distinct from each other in sound and spelling, with no words that are rude in combination as far as forty by forty allows, so a result is a new combination by design and may coincide with someone's existing handle, which is what the trailing number is for. These names are not passwords: forty-word lists are far too small for a secret, and the words are chosen for picture rather than entropy. For a password or a passphrase, the Passphrase generator draws from a Diceware list of thousands of words with the right amount of randomness and shows the entropy.

For a real password, the Passphrase generator and the Password generator in the Computing section; for a username with a real-person flavour, the Username page; for a hostname convention for a whole fleet, the Server name page; for a Wi-Fi network name that makes a joke, the Wi-Fi name page; and for the meeting itself, the Meeting name page in the Business section.

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