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
       respectively 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@users.sourceforge.net>.