man > american-english(5)

american-english(5)                         Users' Manual                        american-english(5)

NAME
       american-english - a list of English words

DESCRIPTION
       /usr/share/dict/american-english is an ASCII file which contains an alphabetic list of words,
       one per line.

FILES
       There may be any number of word lists in /usr/share/dict/.  /etc/dictionaries-common/words is
       a    symbolic    link    to    the    currently-chosen    /usr/share/dict/<language>    file.
       /usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to /etc/dictionaries-common/words, and is  the  name
       by which other software should refer to the system word list.  See select-default-wordlist(8)
       for more information, and/or to change the currently-chosen word list.

       The  directory  /usr/share/dict  can  contain word lists for many languages, with name of the
       language in English, e.g., /usr/share/dict/french and /usr/share/dict/danish contain  respec‐
       tively  lists of French and Danish words if they exist.  Such lists should be coded using the
       ISO 8859-1 character set encoding.

SEE ALSO
       ispell(1), select-default-wordlist(8), and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

HISTORY
       The words lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number of sources.

       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.

AUTHOR
       Word  lists  are  collected and maintained by various authors.  The Debian English word lists
       are built from the SCOWL (Spell- Checker Oriented Word Lists) package, whose upstream  editor
       is Kevin Atkinson <kevina AT users.net>.

Debian                                      16 June 2003                         american-english(5)