Man page 5 : american-english

american-english - a list of English words

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

There may be any number of word lists in /usr/share/dict/. /etc/dictionaries-common/wordsis a symbolic link to the currently-chosen /usr/share/dict/<language>file. /usr/share/dict/wordsis a symbolic link to /etc/dictionaries-common/words , and is the name by which other software should refer to the system word list. See

R select-default-wordlist (8) for more information, and/or to change the currently-chosen word list.

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

R ispell (1),

R select-default-wordlist (8), and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard .

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/wordsdoes not exist.

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 <>.