british-english(5)

💖 british-english — a whole vibe, but make it a word list 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to british-english(5), which is genuinely just... a list of English words. That's it. That's the whole thing. And yet?? It's lowkey load-bearing for half your system, so let's get into it ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

british-english — a list of English words 🫶

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

/usr/share/dict/british-english is an ASCII file, and inside it is an alphabetic list of words — one per line, no drama, no extras. Just words. Alphabetical. Line by line. Iconic behaviour honestly.

🎀 FILES 🎀

There may be any number of word lists in /usr/share/dict/. Like, as many as your heart desires.

/etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen /usr/share/dict/<language> file. So it's the little middle-manager symlink of the dictionary world 💅

/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. That's the one you tell your apps about, okay? That's the assignment. 📌

Want more info, or wanna change which word list is the chosen one? Go see select-default-wordlist(8). It handles all of that for you, no cap.

The directory /usr/share/dict can contain word lists for many languages, with the name of the language in English. For example, /usr/share/dict/french and /usr/share/dict/danish contain respectively lists of French and Danish words — if they exist, which is doing a lot of work in that sentence 😭

Such lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. That's not a suggestion, bestie, that's the spec. 🌈

✨ 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. So don't come for them about their origins, they're doing their best 🙈

Plot twist: the system word list used to be /usr/dict/words. The old location. The ancestral home. For compatibility, software should check that location if /usr/share/dict/words does not exist. So like, check the old spot as a backup, but only as a backup. Periodt. 🔥

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Word lists are collected and maintained by various authors — it's a group project, and yes, everyone did in fact do their part this time 🫶

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 the main character of this whole operation ⭐

and that's the tea, bestie 💅 This was british-english(5) from Debian, dated 16 June 2003. Yes, 2003. She's vintage, she's reliable, she's still on your machine right now. Obsessed. 🎀✨🦋