Create a strong passphrase you can remember

The old advice — eight characters of soup like Tr0ub4d0r! — produced

passwords humans can't remember and computers guess fine. The better

way is a passphrase: several unrelated words strung together.

Build one

1. Pick four random, unrelated words — genuinely random, not your

dog-street-team trio. Glance around, open a book, roll dice against

a word list: copper-waffle-thursday-sail.

1. Make it yours with a capital or a separator if the system demands

variety — length is doing the real work at 20+ characters.

1. Say it to yourself twice — if it sticks in ten seconds, it's a

keeper. That's the entire point: strong and memorable.

The two rules that matter more than any single password

1. Never reuse it. One breach of one shopping site turns a reused

password into a key for your email. Unique everywhere — which is

humanly impossible without help, so:

1. Let a password manager remember all but one. You memorize one

great passphrase (the manager's), it generates and remembers the

rest. If your workplace provides one, use it.

What to avoid

Anything about you that's findable — names, birthdays, pets, teams,

your company. Any single dictionary word with predictable dressing

(Summer2026 and its cousins are the first thousand guesses). And any

password you've already seen in a breach notice — retire it

everywhere.

Where this matters most

Your email account outranks everything (it resets all the others), so

it gets the best passphrase — protected further by multi-factor

authentication, which your organization has likely already set up on

work accounts. Passphrase plus MFA is the combination that ends most

account takeovers.