Included in GNU/Linux (and MacOSx as well) is a stan­dard file, which is just delim­ited list of dic­tio­nary words. *

/usr/share/dict/words

To select a ran­dom word:

cat /usr/share/dict/words | shuf -n 1 

Check also the other files in /usr/share/dict. Very useful!


If your oper­at­ing sys­tem is miss­ing the shuf–util­ity you can use this:

perl -MList::Util -e 'print List::Util::shuffle <>' /usr/share/dict/propernames | tail -1