american-english-huge(5)

💖 american-english-huge — a list of English words 💖

ok so bestie, welcome to the manual page for american-english-huge(5), living in the Users' Manual section. it's not that deep, but it IS iconic, so let's get into it 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

american-english-huge — literally just a list of English words. that's it. that's the whole vibe. 💅

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

/usr/share/dict/american-english-huge is an ASCII file, and inside it is an alphabetic list of words, one per line. no cap. just words, alphabetized, stacked, slaying. ✨

🎀 FILES 🎀

ngl there can be any number of word lists chillin' in /usr/share/dict/. it's a whole friend group.

• /etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link pointing at the currently-chosen /usr/share/dict/<language> file. she's the it-girl of the moment.
• /usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to /etc/dictionaries-common/words, and this is the name that other software should use when it wants to refer to the system word list. so like, if you're software, that's the name you call her by, okay? 🫶

if you want more info, or you wanna change the currently-chosen word list, go read select-default-wordlist(8). she's got the lore.

the directory /usr/share/dict can hold word lists for many languages, and each one is named with the name of the language in English — for example, /usr/share/dict/french and /usr/share/dict/danish contain, respectively, lists of French and Danish words if they exist. keyword: if they exist. don't come for me if they're not there. 🙈

heads up bestie: those lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. that's the assignment, okay? ✨

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• ispell(1)
• select-default-wordlist(8)
• and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. very academic of us. 💜

💜 HISTORY 💜

so the tea is: these word lists are not specific, and they may be generated from any number of sources. it's giving ✨collage✨. she contains multitudes.

also, back in the day, the system word list used to live at /usr/dict/words. the old address. the ancestral home. 😭 so for compatibility reasons, software should check that location if /usr/share/dict/words does not exist. like, go look for your friend at her old place if she's not at the new one. periodt. 💅

👑 AUTHOR 👑

word lists are collected and maintained by various authors — it's a group project, and honestly everyone ate. 🫶

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>. king behavior, no cap. 👑

and that's the whole page bestie!! this lil masterpiece came to you from Debian, dated 16 June 2003 — yeah she's an elder but she's still serving 💖✨🎀 bye ily, go read a dictionary 🦋🌸