Well everyone with their seed phrase but honestly I have opened several Bitcoin wallets many of them for experimental purposes but never have I seen in those countless Bitcoin wallet over the years there been a repetition of words in the entire seed phrase now imagine how funny it is to have the same word right after the first one.
Ok let's take out the odd thoughts of having same one following each other in your seed phrase, you don't only just write down your seed phrase and then drop it you count the words and ensure it is the accurate amount.

Yeah many don’t realize that repeated words are perfectly valid in BIP39 seed phrases, in your situation, you got lucky cause you were able to fix your laptop. One thing that is always emphasized is to always verify your backup immediately.

Never assume your backup is correct unless you have verified it. Immediately you write down your seed phrase, try restoring it  on an offline device or in a trusted wallet as a recovery test, if it restores correctly then you can be rest assured that your backup is correct, it’s a simple test that will take little of your time but can ultimately save you from discovering a mistake when you actually need to recover your wallet. Better safe than sorry!

No I haven’t and I will like to ask Which wallet software you used?

I will assume you copied and pasted it  just to access before  writing it down  or you used a wallet app that doesn’t strictly require you to verify your written seed before using the wallet itself..

Mistakes like that are rare in Electrum..but it can happen  if you didn’t enter the seed phrase directly from your written seed backup.. because Electrum will always force you to verify the seed before you continue.


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The one word is just going to be the combination of the entire wordlist count (2,048 in your case), assuming you know the position.

While if you don’t know the position.. you have to use your basic combination math formula nCr × (wordlist count)^r, where n is either 12 or 24 or ..  and r is the missing word count.

I hope nothing is on that wallet, if that’s truly your seed lol.

How do you not know that the seed phrase or recovery phrase should be 12, 15, or 18 and 24, but 12 and 24 are more common among wallets. You should have counted the words before assuming that your seed is complete. That is your mistake, knowing about the seed phrase should have made you curious about the words and the numbers.


Did you back it up from the wallet, or did you write it down as it shows it to you? The norm and tradition of most wallet backups is that when you want to back up the seed phrase, you have to write down the words, the app will ask you to input the seed phrase back to confirm if you wrote down fewer words and if they are also correct. Some do randomly ask for 3-4 words, this should have helped you avoid the mistake.



I hope you know that there are other type of seed phrase, electrum seed phrase is different from BIP39 and so is SLIP39 and all are valid seed phrase. I didn't see anywhere OP mentioned of BIP39 that is why I'm making reference to that part from your post.

Such an incident has never happened to me and I don't pray to encounter such because it is minor mistakes like this that hurt the most and while it was recovered by OP, someone else could begin to entertain suicidal thoughts mostly if they have invested a lot in Bitcoin and this happens all of a sudden. Just imagine the drama and chaos and transfer of aggression that could happen.

It is good to be careful and triple check when trying to keep our seed phrases safe, mostly when we have to replicate it into several safe points as backup Incase we lose one.

I have not encountered this problem since I always count the words to check whether I missed one or not.  Then checking the spelling and placement.  I believe almost all of us here do this kind of checking after writing the seed phrase.  @OP, are you drunk or bz with other stuff when you created the wallet, and at the same it is very intriguing to hear that there is a seed phrase that repeats the word, this is my first time reading it actually.

This could  literally happen to anyone because from my experience on all the wallets I’ve created before i haven’t seen a situation where a word is repeated among the seed phrase not to talk of the words should be next to each other other, I think op must have thought he was the one that repeated the word from his back up because he’s not use to such and then probably didn’t count the whole phrase after the backup. I also think the backups on the device was correct but the one on the paper was wrong and he didn’t notice until he needed to use the back as he’s trying to import the wallet after fixing his device.

Not at all, Infact this is my first time seeing such cases of repeated word among the seed phrase, but then again I don’t think it would have happened to me even if there was a repetition of word I will dictate it because I take my time to examine the seed phrase when ever I am doing my back up because I understand what it means by not your keys not your coin.

Yes, absolutely correct, in the case of wallet recovery just keeping the backup safe on pc is not enough. It is equally important to write the seed phrases manually on paper.

But BIP39 does not prohibit the repetition of same word. The same word can appear more than once in a valid seed phrase. So you have to be very careful while writing.

After writing a seed phrase, I myself point to each word with a pen or finger and match all the words one by one. And I manually write it down several times separately, so that even if I make a mistake in one place, I can find the correct word in another.

These extra five minutes can save you from many years of regret in future. In the case of self custody Bitcoin itself is not big risk the biggest risk is our small mistake.

I think I’ve also made similar mistake too , sometimes I might even spell some of the words wrongly . That’s why nothing is like 100% safe even storing your seed phrase offline is also risky to some extent , your seed phrase can be expose to some physical damages like it getting burn or wet and also misplacing it . All these are possible when come to keeping your seed phrase offline, one just have to be careful cause you can never be too careful any mistake can cost you a fortune.