british-english(5)

british-english5

A list of english words

Overview

/usr/share/dict/british-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 respectively lists of French and Danish words if they exist. Such lists should be coded using the ISO 8859-1 character set encoding.

Releases

Unchanged in 11 releases since Debian 3.1 (Sarge).

  1. 3.1–13

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 <[email protected]>.

From wbritish 2020.12.07-4 in Debian 13 (Trixie). Parsed by carta from the page's man source.