borrow
/ˈbɒrəʊ/
Binary Representation
11-bit index: 00011010000 (decimal 208)
Position
#209 of 2048
Hex Index
0x0D0
4-Letter Prefix
borr
About "borrow" in BIP39
"borrow" is the #209 word
in the official BIP39 English mnemonic wordlist. It is encoded as the 11-bit binary value
00011010000
(decimal index 208), placing it at the 10% mark of the full 2048-word list.
The 4-letter prefix "borr" uniquely identifies this word among all 2048 entries. At 6 characters, it falls in the typical length range for BIP39 words, balancing readability with distinctiveness during manual wallet recovery.
Positioned in the first quarter of the wordlist (index 208), "borrow" starts with "B" — a letter group containing 117 words total. It is word #73 within that group. Words early in the list have lower binary values with more leading zeros, which can be relevant when analyzing raw entropy data.
In a 12-word seed phrase, each word encodes 11 bits of entropy. The probability of "borrow" appearing in any specific position of a randomly generated phrase is 1 in 2048 (≈ 0.049%). A complete 24-word phrase encodes 256 bits of entropy, providing security equivalent to a key space of approximately 1.16 × 10⁷⁷ — far beyond the reach of brute-force attacks.
Word #209 in the Other 9 BIP39 Wordlists
Every official BIP39 wordlist has exactly 2048 entries, so index 208 encodes the same 11-bit value
(00011010000) in every language.
A wallet configured for one of these languages would use this word instead of "borrow":