Wikipedia says it's part of the wishlistWordlist or Words packageOn Debian and Ubuntu, the words file is provided by the wordlist package, or its provider packages wbritish, wamerican, etc. On Fedora and Arch, the words file is provided by the words package.WikiBut from where is this compiled? I've been using it to 'help' solve  crosswords at work,  but there's a lot of words it is missing,  and a lot that I don't recognise. What are the origins of this file? 
Who or what compiled /usr/share/dict/words?
dictionary;historical unix