/usr/share/dict/american-english is an ASCII file which contains an alphabetic list of words, one per
line.
FILES
There may be any number of word lists in /usr/share/dict/.
/etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen
/usr/share/dict/<language> file.
/usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to
/etc/dictionaries-common/words , and is the name by which other software should refer to the
system word list.
See
select-default-wordlist (8) for more information, and/or to change the currently-chosen word list.
The directory
/usr/share/dict can contain word lists for many languages, with name of the language
in English, e.g.,
/usr/share/dict/french and
/usr/share/dict/danish contain respectively lists of French and Danish words if they exist.
Such lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding.
SEE ALSO
ispell(1) , select-default-wordlist (8), and the
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard .
HISTORY
The words lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number
of sources.
The system word list used to be
/usr/dict/words . For compatibility, software should check that location if
/usr/share/dict/words does not exist.
AUTHOR
Word lists are collected and maintained by various authors.
The Debian English word lists are built from the SCOWL (Spell-
Checker Oriented Word Lists) package, whose upstream editor is
Kevin Atkinson <kevina@users.sourceforge.net>.
