canadian-english-small(5)

💖 canadian-english-small — a list of English words 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to section 5 of the Users' Manual, where we meet canadian-english-small 🍁✨ she's a word list, she's an icon, she's literally just words.

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

/usr/share/dict/canadian-english-small is an ASCII file, no cap. Inside? An alphabetic list of words, one per line. That's it. That's the whole vibe. 📖💅

🎀 FILES 🎀

• There may be any number of word lists chilling in /usr/share/dict/. Like, the more the merrier, fr fr. 🌈
• /etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen /usr/share/dict/<language> file. She's the middleman. The connector. The main character's bestie. 🔗
• /usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to /etc/dictionaries-common/words, and it's the name that other software should use when referring to the system word list. Remember this name, bestie, everyone else does. 👑
• Wanna know more, or wanna change which word list is the chosen one? Go read select-default-wordlist(8). She'll tell you everything. 🫶

Also, the directory /usr/share/dict can hold word lists for many languages, and the language's name appears in English in the filename. Like /usr/share/dict/french and /usr/share/dict/danish contain French and Danish words respectively — if they exist, obvi. Those lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. Important. Don't skip that part. 💀

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

ispell(1), select-default-wordlist(8), and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. Go read them, they're giving very much supplementary reading. 📚

🦋 HISTORY 🦋

The word lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number of sources. She's mysterious like that. 🙈

Fun lore drop: the system word list used to be /usr/dict/words. For compatibility, software should check that location if /usr/share/dict/words doesn't exist. Legacy behaviour, we respect it. 🕰️

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Word lists are collected and maintained by various authors — a whole squad, honestly. 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, we are obsessed. 🫡💖

ngl if you mess with the symlinks or the encoding, things get weird. This is a friendly heads-up, not a threat. 🌸

okay that's the whole page bestie, you ate that. this was canadian-english-small(5) from the Users' Manual, brought to you by Debian, dated 16 June 2003. mwah, go forth and spell things correctly 💅🎀✨