Created 2 March 2003, last updated 20 March 2007

Theory

Hex letters can be used to write english words, like cafebabe, or deadbeef. This is handy for developers, because we can put “recognizable text” in binary data. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many words spelled with just the letters a through f. Using creative (or l337) spelling, we can expand the list.

Practice

Using an existing list of common words, and a small Python program, I created an 1196-word list of hex words.

I used two different words lists, including the common word list from the Moby lexicon, but there are others to choose from, if you want.

This is the Python script:

import re, string

minlen = 3

subs = [
    #('for', '4'),
    #('four', '4'),
    #('to', '2'),
    ('ate', '8'),
    #('ten', '10'),
    #('g', '6'),
    ('l', '1'),
    ('o', '0'),
    ('s', '5'),
    ('t', '7')
]

reHexWord = re.compile("[a-f0-9]*")
fWords = open('words.txt', 'r')
for w in fWords.xreadlines():
    w = w.strip()
    for old, new in subs:
        w = string.replace(w, old, new)
    if len(w) >= minlen:
        match = reHexWord.search(w)
        if match and match.group() == w:
            print w


The table of substitutions can be adjusted to broaden the list even further. The code above shows some substitutions commented out, because I didn’t think they generally worked well.

My favorites

Words I liked from this list that I haven’t seen before (the 8-letter ones are especially appealing as DWORDs):

The words

Some things to notice:

• Lots of these words are obscure, and therefore useless. For example, what’s an abaca? (a banana-like plant)
• Some useful words were not in the list (decaf and f005ba11)
• These are only single words, not combinations, so cafebabe and decafbad don’t appear.
• The letters “ate” are translated to “8” in this list, not “a7e”, as they also could have been, so you won’t find “10ca7e” here, but you will find “10c8”.
• If we could figure out a way to make an R, we could have acce1er8!

And now, all 1196 words. (And don’t miss the 136 hex color words)