must

"must" is the #1169 word in the official BIP39 English mnemonic wordlist. It is encoded as the 11-bit binary value 10010010000 (decimal index 1168), placing it at the 57% mark of the full 2048-word list.

The 4-letter prefix "must" uniquely identifies this word among all 2048 entries. At just 4 characters, "must" is one of the shorter words in the BIP39 list, making it quicker to type during wallet recovery but potentially easier to confuse with similar short entries.

Located in the middle section of the wordlist (index 1168), "must" belongs to the "M" letter group, which contains 105 words. It is the #101 entry in that group. Mid-range words have a balanced mix of 0s and 1s in their binary representation.

In a 12-word seed phrase, each word encodes 11 bits of entropy. The probability of "must" 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.