5.7.1 Format of the Personal Dictionary

The personal dictionary generally has a filename of the form:

.aspell.lang.pws

And the file itself contains two parts. The first part is a header line of the form:

personal_ws-1.1 lang num [encoding]

where num is the number of words in the list. This number is only used as a hint, and thus does not have to be accurate. When creating a new dictionary it is perfectly acceptable for num to be 0. The encoding is optional and specifies the encoding of the word list. If it is left out the encoding is expected to be in the default encoding for the language as specified by the ‘data-encoding’ option. See data-encoding.

The second part of simply a word list with one word per line.