WORDS(5)

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
/etc/alternatives/dictionary is a symbolic link to a /usr/share/dict/<language> file. /usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to /etc/alternatives/dictionary, and is the name by which other software should refer to the system word list. See update-alternatives(8) for more information.

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), update-alternatives(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.