How to create a strong password

It's important to keep your password safe. Here are some tips for ensuring your passwords are as strong as possible.

Passwords should be:

  • Unique to You
    Your password should be unique to you such that another person probably will have never used it. This is important because people tend to use a lot of the same passwords. Hackers don't even need to break into any site on the internet if your password is common enough. 

  • Unique to Duolingo
     You should not re-use your password from Duolingo on sites that potentially guard things of greater importance (for mobile banking, government websites or your email account) for the same reason. 

  • Long
    Password should be at least 12 characters.  If you get to a long password by repeating a character or following a simple pattern like "abcdefghijkl" or "123456789012" or "fourfourfour" the length of the password is doing very little to keep your account safe. 

You could base your password off of:

  •  A lyric from a song or poem 
  •  A meaningful quote from a movie or speech 
  •  A passage from a book you like 
  •  A series of words that are meaningful to you 

Things to Avoid 

There are some things that may be meaningful to you but you should still AVOID incorporating them into your passwords. This tends to be because the information is actually easily guessed by someone who knows you or has access to info on your social media profiles. Especially AVOID easily guessed personal info like 

  • Your nickname or initials 
  • The name of your child or pet 
  • Important birthdays or years 
  • The name of your street 
  • Numbers from your address
  • Sequences like "abcd" or "1234" 
  • Keyboard patterns like "qwerty" or "qazwsx"

Helpful Tools 

Worried you may not be able to memorize all of your new, unique passwords? Your browser may have a feature to help you store and keep track of them. Such as Apple's iCloud Keychain or Google's Password Manager. For advanced security, many authenticator apps also provide password storage.