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I am trying to solve a specific problem that has some other applications.

My specific problem is I want to add an English word to every file from my camera. The files come in like [date]_time.jpg. Although I think the best workflow involves using a photo management app like DarkTable, sometimes you just want to quickly browse your filesystem and grab the original image. Browsing just by datetime creates problems when you take two very similar images seconds apart. It takes a lot of effort determining which is which. And if you pick out your best picture from a shoot, you then have to mentally note you want timestamp _12345678 and find it in your folder.

I think it would be smoother to have files like:

  • 20261019_cape_12345678
  • 20261019_echo_12346678

In my specific case, 100 unique words is the absolute minimum, with 500-2000 words being more comfortable.

This is trivial if you have a "wordlist", a list of words you find suitable for the task. And there's the rub. What's a good wordlist? I can hack one together myself but I'm hoping some top minds have thought about this.

Some prior art that I've found is:

This task is nontrivial in my use case. Words can:

  • evoke computers - copy, original, resize, error, fail, process, base, cat, category, data, base, idle, arm
  • evoke other common file formats - album, music, song, camera, photo, video
  • evoke the contents of an image or file - cool, neat, tree, car, sky, beautiful, best, trip
  • evoke common filenames and extensions - wave
  • be full on offensive
  • be offensive in some contexts, as well as have a negative connotation in the most literal sense: bad, corrupt, awful, awkward, bomb

This is partly an "I know it when I see it" problem, but I'm kind of looking for the 500 blandest, most non-ideological English words there are.

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[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-passphrases

The EFF has a wordlist alike diceware as well. Mind you have a computer at your disposal. You could write a short program to cross-check wordlists against some list of vulgar words. And in case 500 words is all you need, why not just go through them? Shouldn't take more than 10 minutes and you're done.

this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
33 points (90.2% liked)

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