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by throwaway81523 1524 days ago
Look at diceware.com for a good way to do that. You can calculate the entropy without "research". I use a simple python script for the purpose, filtering out the words < 7 chars long from /usr/share/dict/words instead of bothering with the official diceware list. Example output: "snored-Hoff-virtue-tab-eroded-Perl's" with estimated 87 bits of entropy. If you write the phrase on a piece of paper and refer to the paper when typing the phrase into a computer, then after a few uses you will remember the phrase without any special memorization effort. At that point you can shred or burn the paper, or possibly record it in an offline encrypted file requiring its own security efforts.
1 comments

Also take a look at the EFF’s wordlists [1] as an alternative to the Diceware list. Quoting from their blog post, here are some issues with the Diceware list that they have resolved: - It contains many rare words such as buret, novo, vacuo

- It contains unusual proper names such as della, ervin, eaton, moran

- It contains a few strange letter sequences such as aaaa, ll, nbis

- It contains some words with punctuation such as ain't, don't, he'll

- It contains individual letters and non-word bigrams like tl, wq, zf

- It contains numbers and variants such as 46, 99 and 99th

- It contains many vulgar words

- Diceware passwords need spaces to be correctly decoded, e.g. in and put are in the list as well as input

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...

Thanks for the link, but it's broken, should be: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...

I think you copy-pasted it from elsewhere on HN, causing the end to be cut off.