prusnak/mnemonic — pull request #1 by voisine (2013-07-13 06:03:34+00:00)
Title: proposed english word list

I've created an english word list starting with the 5000 most frequently used words from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

Then I removed any words that, are longer than 10 characters, contain any capital letters or punctuation or are in the electrum word list.

Then I remove any duplicates and a few more words that are problematic (swear words, vs, ie, ah, uh),

Then I look at all the words that share the same first four letters and keep only the shortest one (I tried going down to three but there weren't enough words left from the 5000 list to get to 1626)

As far as other languages are concerned, my thinking is that since english already has to have a lot of its best words removed due to the electrum list, that other languages can skip any words they share with the english list. As more languages are added, each new list will have to avoid words used by the other lists already completed.