NAME¶
american-english - a list of English words
DESCRIPTION¶
/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>.
