WORDS(5)

💖 WORDS(5) — the girlies' guide to the system word list 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to WORDS(5), part of the Linux Programmers Manual 🎀 this one's short but it's important, so grab your strawberry milk and let's go 🍓

✨ NAME ✨

french — a list of french words 🇫🇷 no cap, that's literally it, that's the whole name

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

/usr/share/dict/french is an ASCII file, and inside it? an alphabetic list of words. one per line. that's the vibe 💅

like, it's giving "the world's most organized girl". no chaos, no extra nonsense, just words stacked neatly, one per line, alphabetically. we love a structured queen 👑

🦋 FILES 🦋

okay this is the part where it gets lowkey iconic, because there's a whole symlink situation going on 🔥

• /etc/alternatives/dictionary — this is a symbolic link pointing at a /usr/share/dict/<language> file. yes, any language. it's flexible like that ✨
• /usr/share/dict/words — this one is a symbolic link to /etc/alternatives/dictionary, and this is the name that other software should use when it wants to refer to the system word list. so like, if you're writing a program and you need "the words", you say /usr/share/dict/words and you don't ask questions. periodt 👑

ngl if you wanna know more about how the symlink magic works, go read update-alternatives(8) — it's the backstage crew making all of this happen 🫶

and then there's the directory itself, /usr/share/dict, which can hold word lists for many languages 🌈 and the naming convention? the language name, in English. for example:

• /usr/share/dict/american-english — English words
• /usr/share/dict/danish — Danish words

...if they exist. which, like, they might not 🙈 but if they do, that's what they are.

⚠️ real talk bestie: such lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding. not optional, not a suggestion, that's the spec 💀

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

go be nosy, it's good for you:

• ispell(1)
• update-alternatives(8)
• and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 📚

🧚 HISTORY 🧚

the words lists are not specific — they can be generated from any number of sources. so like, nobody's out here claiming they came from one sacred place, they just are, and we respect it 🌸

👑 AUTHOR 👑

word lists are collected and maintained by various authors. it's a group project, and somehow it actually worked out 💖

so that's WORDS(5), short and sweet and honestly kind of a bop. this page comes from the Linux man-pages, dated 29 Sept 1998 (yes bestie, 1998, she's vintage and she ATE) — stay literate, stay slay, ily, bye 💅✨🦋