british-english-large(5)

💖 british-english-large — a whole vibe of a word list, bestie 💖

okay so like. this is page 5 of the Users' Manual, and it's all about british-english-large ✨ which is literally just… a list of English words. that's it. that's the whole thing. and honestly? iconic.

🌸 NAME 🌸

british-english-large — a list of English words 🫶

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so bestie, /usr/share/dict/british-english-large is an ASCII file, and inside it is an alphabetic list of words. one word per line. no drama, no vibes beyond that. it's giving "simple but essential" and we respect it 💅

🎀 FILES 🎀

there can be any number of word lists chillin' in /usr/share/dict/. like, the whole squad can be there.

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

and then /usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to /etc/dictionaries-common/words — and that is the name other software should use when it refers to the system word list. so if you're writing software and you want the word list, that's the path you call. no cap.

want more info, or wanna switch up which word list is the chosen one? go see select-default-wordlist(8) 💜

also!! the directory /usr/share/dict can hold word lists for many languages, and the name of the language is written in English. for example, /usr/share/dict/french and /usr/share/dict/danish contain, respectively, lists of French and Danish words — if they exist. so like, don't come for them if they're not there 🙈

and important: such lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. periodt.

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

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

🦋 HISTORY 🦋

ngl, the word lists are not specific, and they may be generated from any number of sources. it's giving "mysterious origin story" and honestly, we love that for them 🌈

and fun fact: 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. so like, always check both, bestie — it's the responsible main character move 💀

💜 AUTHOR 💜

word lists are collected and maintained by various authors — it's a whole community effort, we're obsessed 🫶

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 tea, bestie 💖✨🎀🦋🌸💅 this page came out of the Debian side of things, dated 16 June 2003, and it's british-english-large(5) all day every day. go forth and spell correctly. slay 👑