american-english(5)

✨ american-english — a list of English words 💖

okay bestie, welcome to american-english(5) from the Users' Manual, and honestly? this one's a vibe. it's a page about a word list. like, just words. thousands of them. let's go 🦋

🌸 NAME 🌸

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

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so /usr/share/dict/american-english is an ASCII file, and inside it is an alphabetic list of words, one per line. no metadata, no drama, no hidden formatting. just vibes and vocabulary. 🎀

🗂️ FILES 🗂️

okay so here's where it gets a little spicy, because there can be any number of word lists chillin' in /usr/share/dict/. like, the whole squad is in there. 💜

• /etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen /usr/share/dict/<language> file.
• /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. that's the main character name, fr fr. ⭐

if you wanna know more, or if you literally want to change the currently-chosen word list, go check out select-default-wordlist(8). she'll hook you up.

also!! the directory /usr/share/dict can hold word lists for many languages, and the filenames use the language's name in English. so for example, /usr/share/dict/french and /usr/share/dict/danish contain lists of French and Danish words respectively — if they exist. 🙈

no cap: such lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. that's the rule. don't come at me.

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

go read these too, bestie, they're part of the lore:

• ispell(1)
• select-default-wordlist(8)
• and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. yes, really. she's relevant. 💅

📜 HISTORY 📜

the word lists are not specific, and they may be generated from any number of sources. so don't go asking where any single word came from, because honestly? nobody's keeping receipts. 💀

and here's a throwback for the girlies: the system word list used to be /usr/dict/words. so for compatibility, software should check that location if /usr/share/dict/words does not exist. legacy support, we love to see it. 🫶

🧚 AUTHOR 🧚

word lists are collected and maintained by various authors — it's a group project, and yes, everyone did their part. 🎀

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>. give her her flowers. 💐

and that's the whole page, babes 💖 this one came from Debian and it's dated 16 June 2003 — oldie but a goodie. mwah, drink water, and go read a dictionary. 🌈✨