american-english-large(5)

💖 american-english-large — the manual page, bestie edition 💖

okay so you opened american-english-large(5) from the Users' Manual and you're like "what is this" — bestie, it's literally a list of words. that's the whole vibe. let's go ✨

✨ NAME ✨

american-english-large — a list of English words 🦋

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

/usr/share/dict/american-english-large is an ASCII file, no cap. inside it? an alphabetic list of words. one word per line. that's it. that's the whole file. iconic behaviour honestly 💅

🎀 FILES 🎀

so here's the tea about where word lists live:

• there may be any number of word lists chillin' in /usr/share/dict/.
• /etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen /usr/share/dict/<language> file. (yes, language is a placeholder, keep up bestie 💜)
• /usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to /etc/dictionaries-common/words, and that's the name every other piece of software should use when it wants to refer to the system word list. periodt.
• wanna know more, or wanna change which word list is the chosen one? go read select-default-wordlist(8). she's got you 🫶

also, the directory /usr/share/dict can hold word lists for so many languages, with the language's name written in English, like:

• /usr/share/dict/french — French words (if it exists)
• /usr/share/dict/danish — Danish words (if it exists)

heads up: those lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. don't be out here encoding them wrong, bestie 😭

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

go be nosy, it's giving research era:

• ispell(1)
• select-default-wordlist(8)
• and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

🌈 HISTORY 🌈

storytime, sit down 🧚

• the words lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number of sources. mysterious. enigmatic. we love that for them.
• 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. old school path, still valid, don't forget her 💜

👑 AUTHOR 👑

word lists are collected and maintained by various authors — a whole committee of word girlies, basically.

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> 💖

and that's the whole page, bestie — this was the Debian version, dated 16 June 2003, and you just read the american-english-large(5) manual. slay, go forth and grep some words ✨💅🌸