TL;DR

Expanding the list of words taken from Nuovo vocabolario di base.

Italian is my native language so it’s pretty natural for me to concentrate on it. Additionally, I’d like to get some people onboard with making their passphrases stronger, and they’re mostly Italians.

One great thing is that Italian has a lot of variants of basic words, to be used depending on the specific situation. As an example, whereas English has very little variations for the present tense (just adding an s letter for the singular third person), Italian usually has a specific variant for the different alternatives.

As an example, let’s play a bit:

I      play    |  Io        gioco
You    play    |  Tu        giochi
She/He plays   |  Ella/Egli gioca
We     play    |  Noi       giochiamo
You    play    |  Voi       giocate
They   play    |  Esse/Essi giocano

Something similar happens for adjectives (which might have alternatives for female/male forms, as well as singular/plural) and, to a lesser degree, nouns. As an example, this is cat:

Singular, female  cat  |  gatta
Singular, male    cat  |  gatto
Plural,   female  cat  |  gatti
Plural,   male    cat  |  gatte

Hence, I think it’s just right to take advantage of these variations to spice things up in passphrases generations. Like we might end up adding a couple of bits of entropy, or more!

This also helps us address a little elephant in the room. Many words are admittedly long, so having to type four long words might scare people away. On the other hand, removing long words has an impact on the entropy we can expect out of each word, so we hope that we can somehow compensate with these variations.

Let’s see!