.TH WORDLIST 5 "16 June 2003" "Debian" "Users' Manual"
.SH NAME
WORDLIST \- a list of English words
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B /usr/share/dict/WORDLIST
is an ASCII file which contains an alphabetic list of words, one per
line.
.SH FILES
There may be any number of word lists in /usr/share/dict/.
.I /etc/dictionaries-common/words
is a symbolic link to the currently-chosen
.I /usr/share/dict/<language>
file.
.I /usr/share/dict/words
is a symbolic link to
.IR /etc/dictionaries-common/words ,
and is the name by which other software should refer to the
system word list.
See
.BR select-default-wordlist (8)
for more information, and/or to change the currently-chosen word list.
.PP
The directory
.I /usr/share/dict
can contain word lists for many languages, with name of the language
in English, e.g.,
.I /usr/share/dict/french
and
.I /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.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR ispell (1),
.BR select-default-wordlist (8),
and the
.I Filesystem Hierarchy
.IR Standard .
.SH HISTORY
The words lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number
of sources.
.PP
The system word list used to be
.IR /usr/dict/words .
For compatibility, software should check that location if
.I /usr/share/dict/words
does not exist.
.SH 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>.