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/dic
       tionaries-common/words  is  a  symbolic	link  to  the currently-chosen
       /usr/share/dict/ 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  lan
       guages,	  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  .



Debian				 16 June 2003		   american-english(5)