american-english-insane(5)

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

okay so bestie, this is american-english-insane, and it's a manual page from the Users' Manual, section 5 (that's the file-formats girlies). buckle up, it's a whole vibe. 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

american-english-insane — literally just a list of English words. that's it. that's the whole thing. and yet she's iconic for it. 👑

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane is an ASCII file, and inside it? an alphabetic list of words, one per line. no cap. it's giving "dictionary but make it a text file." 💅

🎀 FILES 🎀

there may be any number of word lists chillin' in /usr/share/dict/. like, as many as she wants. no limit.

/etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen /usr/share/dict/<language> file. so it's basically the main character pointing at whoever's currently holding the crown. 👑

and /usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to /etc/dictionaries-common/words, and this is the name by which other software should refer to the system word list. like, if some program needs the system word list, this is the address she should be sliding into. 📬

fr fr, go read select-default-wordlist(8) for more info, and/or if you wanna change the currently-chosen word list. she's the one who handles all that. ✨

the directory /usr/share/dict can contain word lists for many languages, and the name of the language is written in English — e.g. /usr/share/dict/french and /usr/share/dict/danish contain respectively lists of French and Danish words, if they exist. (conditional queen. she may or may not show up. 🙈)

and those lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. don't be out here using some other encoding, that's not the move. 🚫

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• ispell(1)
• select-default-wordlist(8)
• and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. (no man page number, she's just that girl, she doesn't need one 💖)

🌈 HISTORY 🌈

the word lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number of sources. so don't come for her about where the words came from, she doesn't know either, and honestly? she doesn't need to. 💀

fun lil lore drop: the system word list used to be /usr/dict/words. iconic era, but we've moved on. for compatibility though, software should check that location if /usr/share/dict/words does not exist. so like, check the old spot if the new spot ghosted you. 🫶

💜 AUTHOR 💜

word lists are collected and maintained by various authors — it's a group project, and yes, they all carried. 🫶

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>. shoutout to Kevin, we love a maintainer. 🌟

and that's the whole page bestie, you ate. this one's from the Debian crew, version dated 16 June 2003, and it lives at american-english-insane(5). mwah. 💋✨