american-english-small(5)

💖 american-english-small(5) 💖

okay bestie, buckle up, we're reading the manual for american-english-small — yeah that's right, this is section 5 of the Users' Manual, the file formats zone, and honestly? it's giving "humble text file, main character energy." 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

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

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so /usr/share/dict/american-english-small is an ASCII file, bestie. it contains an alphabetic list of words, one per line. no headers, no drama, no metadata — just words, alphabetically, stacked like a lil tower of vocabulary. 🦋

🎀 FILES 🎀

okay so here's where it gets spicy, because there's a whole ecosystem of word lists going on and you NEED to know the lore:

• there may be any number of word lists just vibing in /usr/share/dict/.
• /etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen /usr/share/dict/<language> file. it's the "who's on aux right now" of word lists. 🔥
• /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 you're writing software and you need THE system word list, you point at this one, not at some random language file. periodt. 💜
• wanna see who's chosen, or change who's chosen? select-default-wordlist(8) has your back — go read it for more information, and/or to change the currently-chosen word list. slay.

and like, the directory /usr/share/dict can contain word lists for many languages, with the name of the language 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, obviously, no promises, it's a "if they exist" situation. 🙈

⚠️ real talk though: such lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. not whatever encoding you feel like. ISO 8859-1. write that down. 📝

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

go be nosy, bestie:

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

🌈 HISTORY 🌈

story time 📖✨

the word lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number of sources. like, they're assembled, not divinely ordained. no cap.

also, 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. legacy behavior stays undefeated, I guess. 💀

👑 AUTHOR 👑

word lists are collected and maintained by various authors — it's a group project that somehow actually worked out. 🫶

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>. thank you Kevin, icon behavior. ⭐

and that's the whole page, bestie — this lil manual was brought to you by Debian, dated 16 June 2003, and it's been serving c*nt and word lists ever since. mwah. 💋💖✨