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hex - What english words can be created using hexadecimal? - Stack Overflow

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Tags: words hexadecimal stackoverflow.com
Clipped on: 2020-03-10

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Closed 10 years ago by danben, cletus, Nifle, Pascal Cuoq, Josh.

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I'm setting up an old wireless router for a friend which uses WEP (Yeah, very old, not actually very secure, but enough to keep the non-technical people in her apartment complex from sucking bandwidth) and I need to have a 10 digit hexadecimal key as the password.

So the question is, what english words can be made using the hexadecimal character set: 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 A B C D E F

BEEF is an example. I think that leet character would be allowed as well, So the number 0 could be used for the letter o. This lets you make the word BEA7.

asked Mar 6 '10 at 23:42
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  • not programming related but... beef, feed, bee, bade, bad, bead, dead, deed, deaf, add, ace, cede – cletus Mar 6 '10 at 23:47
  • 4
    egrep -i '[a-foilstge]+' /usr/share/dict/words | tr oilstge 0115793 | tr A-Z a-z – Andrew McGregor Mar 7 '10 at 0:06
  • Because of the way you worded this, it may not be programming appropriate, but in actuality, embedded programmers use these regularly to make memory dumps and debugging easier to visualize. – Harvey Mar 7 '10 at 1:20
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Java CAFEBABE, COFEEBABE or DEADBEEF for instance. You might like to check HexWords or Ned Batchelder Hex Words for a lot more examples.

answered Mar 6 '10 at 23:46
Image (Asset 1/2) alt=
While you can spell out 0xC0FFEEBABE in hex, 0xCAFEBABE is the magic number that starts every Java class file. artima.com/insidejvm/whyCAFEBABE.html – Bill the Lizard Mar 7 '10 at 1:24
  • Thanks, edited to correct this. – pajton Mar 7 '10 at 8:00
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    My favorite one is deface, as it is long, strict hex and a well known IT security concept. I also like decade. Phrases are also cool: a dead beef bedded a defaced babe – Ciro Santilli 新疆改造中心法轮功六四事件 Nov 13 '14 at 9:47
  • Personal favourite: 0xBABEFACE. – user458541 Dec 8 '16 at 15:00
  • You can switch more with leet speak so get things like: codifiabilities c0d1f1ab11171e5, decasyllabics deca5711ab1c5, decidabilities dec1dab11171e5, fatalistically fa7a11571ca117, badasses bada55e5, database da7aba5e, effaced – Tatarize May 26 '17 at 2:53
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    This post is hidden. It was deleted 10 years ago by the post author.

    I've always used my home phone number. But voting to migrate this to superuser.

    answered Mar 6 '10 at 23:48