A file on Unix systems that contains plain English words, one per line, in alphabetical order. It's a good thing to use as input to a password cracker since so many people pick bad passwords.

Different systems' /usr/dict/words will be different sizes. Linux has a pretty good one, though.

In an on-campus interview that I had with Sun, for a job doing Solaris kernel development, my interviewers and I discussed /usr/dict/words at pretty good length. How to compress it, store it, update it, et cetera, et cetera.

But mostly I listened to them (it was a 2-on-1 interview) discuss amongst themselves how small and inadequate the /usr/dict/words distributed as part of Solaris is. The word "sparse" was used quite frequently.

(In case you were wondering, the consensus was that some sort of tree structure was the way to go, although they did have me explain Huffman coding.)

(Also, in case you were wondering, they never called me back. I also never called them back, so I suppose we're even... I didn't want to work out in California anyway, and besides, "Solaris sucks" according to an AIX developer I know. I had always thought that it was alright, but never having used AIX, I can't say that it doesn't suck, relatively..)

On Debian, this is placed in /usr/share/dict/words.

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