On Fri, 11 May 2007, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.security.misc, in article
<7i_0i.172910$DE1.113478@pd7urf2no>, Walter Roberson wrote:

>Benoit Leraillez <benoit.sansspam@leraillez.sansspam.com> wrote:

>> Have you etimated the size of your new dictionary? Just start with
>>100 000 words, that gives us 10 000 000 000 on a two word list and
>>1 000 000 000 000 000 for a three word list, just say a word is 8
>>letters long, that gives us a mean size of 24 letters so we need
>>approximatly 24 10^15 or 24 000 TeraBytes. And that's a big hard
>>drive ;-)
>
>The original posting imposed fairly strict limits on the total
>length of the concatenated word. The original posting also implied
>that the length limit was not through truncation -- that the two
>or three words together had to add up to at most the size limit.

The original post said:

Are there password dictionary files whose entries aren't just single
words but rather 2 or 3 words of maybe 6 letters or less concatenated?
For example, "they red solids" are 3 words of 6 letters or less that
concatenated would be "theyredsolids." Are there such dictionary files
downloadable, or is there a relatively easy way one could be created?

[compton ~]$ size.of.words /usr/local/share/dict/web2
Source /usr/local/share/dict/web2 has 235882 words
.. 52 ........ 29988
... 160 ......... 32403
.... 1420 .......... 30878
..... 5272 ........... 26013
...... 10228 ............ 20462
....... 17705 more than 12 char 37432
........ 23869
[compton ~]$ echo "52+160+1420+5272+10228+17705" | bc
34837
[compton ~]$ echo "34837^3" | bc
42278760414253
[compton ~]$

That's still quite a few words to mash together ;-)

/usr/local/share/dict/web2 is the "Webster's Second International"
available through any search engine

Old guy