american-english(5) Users' Manual american-english(5)
NAME
american-english - a list of English words
DESCRIPTION
/usr/share/dict/american-english is an ASCII file which contains an al-
phabetic list of words, one per line.
FILES
There may be any number of word lists in /usr/share/dict/. /etc/dictio-
naries-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 <kev-
ina@users.sourceforge.net>.
Debian 16 June 2003 american-english(5)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Sun Dec 7 05:04:14 CET 2025.