[jxcole]

We used almost this exact scheme for app id indices and the curious problem we had to design against was inadvertent profanity. At some point we decided to just never use vowels to avoid ever having a complaint about 12f*ck if in the URL

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Another approach is to use something like EFF's dice words lists. One of the smaller lists in particular is interesting as it's 6^4 words, filtered for profanity, and where all words have both a unique 3 letter prefix and an edit distance of 3. That makes them robust for the use case of someone reading out the phrase to someone typing or such.

Never using vowells is a smart idea I wish I'd used in the past. Previously when I've needed something like this I've used other dictionary lists vs EFF's, and those were not curated sufficiently to avoid some really unfortunate combinations.

[dolmen]

https://www.eff.org/dice

[manigandham]

Use integer IDs and a library like Hashids for friendly alphanumeric representations: https://hashids.org/

This particular implementation is available in dozens of languages.