[TUHS] Thompson at Berkeley on an 11/70

Greg 'groggy' Lehey grog at lemis.com
Sat Apr 11 14:45:29 AEST 2015


On Friday, 10 April 2015 at 14:37:25 -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> To tell whether Ken installed v6 or a copy of his home
> system, look at /usr/dict/words. On the home system
> that file is the wordlist from Webster's Collegiate
> Dictionary, 7th edition, licensed for Bell Labs use
> only. On distribution systems we substituted the wordlist
> for "spell". The latter list contains many more proper
> names, acronyms, etc than the dictionary did, in
> particular names that appear in Unix documentation
> such as Ritchie, Kernighan, and McIlroy. It also lacks
> lots of trivially derivable words like "organizationally".

In FreeBSD there are two files /usr/share/dict/web2 and
/usr/share/dict/web2a, suggesting that they're Webster.  web2 sounds
like the words file, while web2a apparently consists of compounds.
web2 doesn't contain Ritchie or McIlroy, though it does contain
"organizationally".  The oldest entry in the svn history is:

r1638 | rgrimes | 1994-05-31 05:09:18 +1000 (Tue, 31 May 1994) | 2 lines

BSD 4.4 Lite Share Sources

I don't have sccs, so I can't check the origins of that file.

Comments?

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft MUA reports
problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20150411/b59178c3/attachment.sig>


More information about the TUHS mailing list