### 5.9 Dictionary Naming

In order for Aspell to be able to correctly recognize a dictionary based on the setting of the `LANG` environment variable the dictionaries need to be located somewhere Aspell can find them and they need to be multi dictionaries. Where Aspell looks for dictionaries depends on the value of the `dict-dir` and `word-list-path` option.

`dict-dir` is generally `prefix/lib/aspell`, and `word-list-path` is generally empty.

Each dictionary that you expect Aspell to be able to find needs to have a name in the following format:

    language[_region][-variety][-size].multi

where language is the two letter language code, region is the two letter region code, variety is any extra information to distinguish the word list from other ones with the same language and spelling. Multiple varieties can be used by separating them with a ’-’. Finally, size is the size of the dictionary. If no size is specified then the default size of 60 will be assumed.

For example:

    en.multi
    en_US.multi
    en-medical.multi
    en-medical-85.multi
    en-85.multi
    de.multi