### Install the big wordlist sudo apt install wamerican-insane Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: wamerican-insane 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded. Need to get 1,528 kB of archives. After this operation, 6,966 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://mirror.metrocast.net/ubuntu jammy/universe amd64 wamerican-insane all 2020.12.07-2 [1,528 kB] Fetched 1,528 kB in 3s (437 kB/s) Preconfiguring packages ... Selecting previously unselected package wamerican-insane. (Reading database ... 437782 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../wamerican-insane_2020.12.07-2_all.deb ... Unpacking wamerican-insane (2020.12.07-2) ... Setting up wamerican-insane (2020.12.07-2) ... Processing triggers for cracklib-runtime (2.9.6-3.4build4) ... skipping line: 1 Processing triggers for man-db (2.10.2-1) ... Processing triggers for dictionaries-common (1.28.14) ... ### How many words in each list? wc --lines /usr/share/dict/* 104334 /usr/share/dict/american-english 663473 /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane 170421 /usr/share/dict/american-english-large 275502 /usr/share/dict/brazilian 103494 /usr/share/dict/british-english 54763 /usr/share/dict/cracklib-small 346205 /usr/share/dict/french 116758 /usr/share/dict/italian 356010 /usr/share/dict/ngerman 286295 /usr/share/dict/ogerman 431384 /usr/share/dict/portuguese 6 /usr/share/dict/README.select-wordlist 86016 /usr/share/dict/spanish 356110 /usr/share/dict/swiss 104334 /usr/share/dict/words 104334 /usr/share/dict/words.pre-dictionaries-common 3559439 total ### What word starts with f and ends uck? grep -iE '^f.*uck$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane fernambuck firetruck fistfuck fuck funduck ### The ^ is the anchor for the beginning of the word, the $ anchors ### the end, the -E is for Extended regex, -i is any case, and the .* ### is any number of any character. ### What 8 letter words start with 'm'? grep -E '^m.{7}$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane | wc --lines 3568 ### But, this isn't quite correct, because it includes things like ### mystic's and words like mañana's (518 words with other symbols, ### the fix is; grep -E '^m[a-z]{7}$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane | wc --lines 3050 ### In this case the search is for a lower case m followed by 7 of ### any of the characters in the list from a to z, inclusive. ### And how many words that start with upper or lower 'm'? grep -E '^[mM][a-z]{7}$' /usr/share/dict/american-english-insane | wc --lines 3941