Not referring to word. “academic” that comes twice but instead, I am referring to a word that comes up as duplication with the list of 20 words . Is that normal across the whole process of the initial set up of device?. Note : device pass authentication verification.
Sure, this is normal. 15 of the 20 words are completely random, and 3 (the checksum) also count as “random” for the purposes of this calculation.
Without breaking out the calculators, the chance of two words repeating somewhere in the sequence is going to be somewhere between 2 and 10 %
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Hi
I haven’t used my new Trezor 5 for some time and I need to put some Bitcoin on it, and noticed in my Seed Phrase list of 20 I have doubled up 3 & 4 and now I think I have made a mistake. How do I rectify this? As I obviously don’t want to lose my current BITCOIN stored in there. I can still see all my Bitcoin balance in there, and it’s asking for me to update firmware, which I don’t want to do until I know how to fix this issue.
Please help as I am panicking.
Thanks Rachel
Hi @rachipoo,
The third and fourth word in 20 word Single-share Backups are always: academic and academic. This is because they are there to tell the Trezor that it’s a single-share backup, and don’t reveal part of your private keys (although it’s still a best practice not to share that these are the words if that is the case for you 
).
It’s a good idea to do a check wallet backup before any firmware update. In your case, I hope it will give you peace of mind that you in fact have the correct wallet backup words. While you can certainly do this on your own, myself or another Trezor Expert would be happy to walk you through the check wallet backup process process on a Trezor Expert Onboarding Session 
We can help you manage your wallet, and teach you the basics of staying safe in crypto!
Hi, I created a new wallet and I noticed a duplicate seed word, it looked like this:
- first word
- second word
- third word
- third word again
…
I didn’t think anything of it - but I didn’t want a duplicate word as it could be confusing later on. So I restored the device to factory settings to get a new seed phrase. But then it happened again, and looked like this:
- first word (different than before)
- second word (different than before)
- third word (same as before)
- third word again (same as before)
So now I’m like wtf, and tried it for a third time for science sake… Restoring the wallet to factory setting ect and it did it again… The first two words are seemingly random, but the third and fourth words are duplicates and are the same word as the previous two attempts.
All the above attempts were on the 20-word ‘single share backup’
However, I tried a 4th time on the ‘standard 12-word back up’ and it seemed to work fine. This time with 12 new words and none repeating.
What’s going on?
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I found out the answer to this - incase anyone else comes across this.
When you use the 20-word single share backup - the third and fourth word are always ‘academic’
So all is good!
This seems to be a ‘flaw.’
If it’s known that the 20 word seed phrase always produces ‘academic’ as the 3rd and 4th words, it’s essentially becomes an 18 word seed phrase, right? I’m not a cryptographer so perhaps I’m missing something here.
Thoughts anyone?
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It is not a flaw, that’s how it works…your first 3 words are not part of the seed as such they only contain metadata, because the 20 word seed is expandable to multi share backup and these words contain information about number of shares and type of backup.
We inorm about this on the knowledgebase:
https://trezor.io/learn/a/single-share-backup-on-trezor
the third and fourth word in Single-share Backups are always “academic”
Thank you very much! I read the article. Makes sense now.
Hi Trezor Team,
I have been using my Trezor model 3 device with firmware version 2.8.0 to generate several SLIP-39 seeds with standard 20-word settings. However, I have noticed a strange pattern: in several of the generated seeds, words three and four are the same in 3 of the 5 wallets I have created. The word that keeps repeating is academic
This behavior seems unusual to me, as I understand that words should be selected completely randomly. I am concerned that there may be an issue related to the seed generation, either due to the random number generator or a bug in the firmware.
Could you please confirm if this is expected behavior or if it could be related to a known bug? I am available to provide more details or do additional testing if necessary.
Thank you very much for your attention. I look forward to your response.
Kind regards,
@Meta This is an expected behavior as not all words in a 20 word wallet backup are random. Words 3 and 4 are used to track metadata related to our Shamir Secret Sharing based single share/multi share backup system, and therefore cannot be randomly generated.
The topic has been discussed multiple times on this forum including by our developers. Please ensure you are reviewing past threads before creating duplicate posts.
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