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Phrase · Odd word count
My phrase has 13 words: why that doesn’t exist and what happened
Thirteen-word phrases do not exist. If you counted thirteen, one of four things happened, and none of them is that your wallet is unusual. Working out which one usually unblocks the case in five minutes.
The counts that do exist
A standard phrase has 12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 words. There are no other options. Wallets almost always use 12 or 24; the other three exist but are rare. Any other count means something was added, something is missing, or something was miscounted.
The four explanations
- The extra word is your additional password. A great many people wrote the passphrase on the same sheet, on the next line, and years later count it as one more word of the phrase. If that is your case, excellent news: you have both things. Read it in the «25th word».
- You wrote down a label or a note. The wallet name, the date, the word «Bitcoin». Easy to spot: it won’t be on the list of valid words.
- You miscounted. This happens constantly with phrases written in columns. Count again, out loud, pointing.
- One is missing and one is duplicated because you copied a word twice. Anyone checking the phrase spots it immediately.
The first explanation is the one that most often solves the case, and also the one that prevents the most heartbreak: if that extra word is your passphrase and you throw it away believing it a mistake, you turn a solved case into an impossible one. Before discarding anything, keep everything exactly as it is.
How to tell which is yours
| Sign | Likely explanation |
|---|---|
| The extra word isn’t in the 2048 list | A note, a label or your passphrase |
| It is in the list and sits at the end | Most likely a passphrase |
| It is in the list and sits in the middle | Could be a duplicate: recount |
| You have 11 and one repeated | A word is missing: a workable case |
| You have 16, 20 or 23 | A bad count, or some are missing |
Don’t rewrite the sheet to «leave it at twelve». Note separately what you think is extra, but keep the original untouched: every word you remove on your own is information that can’t be got back.