POLISH(5)

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💖 POLISH(5) 💖

okay bestie, so this is the polish manual page, section 5 (that's the file formats / conventions girlies), coming at you from Debian. it's short, it's sweet, it's literally just a list of Polish words and the drama around where word lists live on your system. let's get into it 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

polish — a list of Polish words 🇵🇱✨

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

/usr/share/dict/polish is an ASCII file, and inside it is an alphabetic list of words — one per line, no notes, no commentary, just vibes and vocabulary. 💅

🎀 FILES 🎀

okay this is the part where the filesystem gets a little ✨ connected ✨ so stay with me:

  • /etc/dictionaries-common/words is a symbolic link to a /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 refer to the system word list by. like, that's the official main-character name, no cap. 👑

if you want more deets on all that, 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, bestie. so like:

  • /usr/share/dict/french → French words 🇫🇷
  • /usr/share/dict/danish → Danish words 🇩🇰

…if they exist. 🙈 (they might not! that's the whole "if" of it.)

⚠️ and listen — those lists should be coded using the UTF-8 character set encoding. no weird legacy encodings in the group chat, please. 😭

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

🦋 HISTORY 🦋

the words lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number of sources. so like, don't @ them about where they came from, they contain multitudes. ✨

the system word list used to be /usr/dict/words — the old address, the pre-glow-up era. 💀 for compatibility, software should check that location if /usr/share/dict/words does not exist. it's giving "check the old house first before assuming nobody's home". 🏠

👑 AUTHOR 👑

word lists are collected and maintained by various authors. it's a whole collaborative effort, a real community moment. 🫶

that's the whole page, bestie — short and iconic, honestly. this one's from the Debian Project, dated March 29th, 2011, and it's POLISH(5). slay 💅✨🎀

📦 where this page comes from