staff

"staff" is the #1697 word in the official BIP39 English mnemonic wordlist. It is encoded as the 11-bit binary value 11010100000 (decimal index 1696), placing it at the 83% mark of the full 2048-word list.

The 4-letter prefix "staf" uniquely identifies this word among all 2048 entries. At 5 characters, it falls in the typical length range for BIP39 words, balancing readability with distinctiveness during manual wallet recovery.

Near the end of the wordlist (index 1696), "staff" is part of the "S" letter group with 250 entries total, positioned at #180 in that group. Words in the upper range of the list have binary representations with more leading 1s.

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