british-english-huge(5)

💖 british-english-huge(5) — the Users' Manual era ✨

okay so bestie, welcome to british-english-huge, section 5 of the Users' Manual, and no cap this is literally just a big ol' pile of English words 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

british-english-huge — a list of English words 📝

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

/usr/share/dict/british-english-huge is an ASCII file, and inside it? a whole alphabetic list of words. one per line. that's it. that's the whole vibe. 💅

🎀 FILES 🎀

so there may be any number of word lists chillin' in /usr/share/dict/. like, however many. no fixed count. it's giving very open-door policy.

/etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen /usr/share/dict/<language> file. the main character, lowkey. 👑

/usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to /etc/dictionaries-common/words, and this is the name other software should refer to the system word list by. so if you're some program looking for the word list, you ask for /usr/share/dict/words. periodt.

peep select-default-wordlist(8) for more info, and/or if you wanna change which word list is currently chosen. go off, switch it up 💫

the directory /usr/share/dict can contain word lists for many languages, with the name of the language in English, e.g. /usr/share/dict/french and /usr/share/dict/danish contain respectively lists of French and Danish words if they exist. emphasis on if, bestie, don't come for me if they're not there 🙈

those kinds of lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. not optional. that's the rule. 🧚

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

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

💀 HISTORY 💀

the word lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number of sources. mysterious. iconic. we simply do not know where they came from and honestly? we're at peace with that ✨

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. yes bestie, legacy paths are forever, we keep them around like old playlists 🎧

👑 AUTHOR 👑

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

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, holding it down 💜

okay that's the whole page, mwah 💋 this one shipped with the Debian manual, dated 16 June 2003, for british-english-huge(5) — yes it's vintage, yes it still slays, and yes you now know it better than half the internet 🌸✨🎀