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 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 Ori-
       ented Word Lists) package, whose upstream editor is Kevin Atkinson <kevina@users.sourceforge.net>.

Debian								   16 June 2003 					       american-english(5)