Use Passwords To Help Improve Your Spelling

For a password to be effective, it has to be difficult. Reader CrowdedTrousers takes an unusual approach to this: choose a word you don’t know how to spell, and the repeated effort of typing it correctly will help you to learn it.

Dictionary picture from Shutterstock

CrowdedTrousers (their choice of name, not ours) explains the logic:

I choose words that I have trouble spelling as my passwords. By the time I’ve typed them in a squillion times, I’m usually no longer troubled by them. Of course you must balance this with password security.

Using an unadorned dictionary word is not good security practice, but you can easily combine your challenger word with numbers and punctuation. Once you know how to spell the word, that might also serve as a cue to change the password.

This list of words which are frequently spelled incorrectly could be a good place to start. If you need broader advice on choosing passwords, we have that too. Thanks CrowdedTrousers!s