In fact, there's another problem: emacs22 and emacs-snapshot don't have the same behavior in this respect (the problem appeared when I switched to emacs22).
For emacs22, the messages are: [...] Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionaries-common.el (source)... Loading debian-ispell... Loading /var/cache/dictionaries-common/emacsen-ispell-default.el (source)...done Loading debian-ispell...done Loading /var/cache/dictionaries-common/emacsen-ispell-dicts.el (source)...done Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionaries-common.el (source)...done Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionary-el.el (source)... Loading dictionary-init...done Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionary-el.el (source)...done [...] For emacs-snapshot, they are: [...] Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionaries-common.el (source)... Skipping dictionaries-common setup for emacs-snapshot Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionaries-common.el (source)...done Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionary-el.el (source)... Loading dictionary-init...done Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionary-el.el (source)...done [...] A workaround is probably to add emacs22 to the list in "/etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionaries-common.el". -- Vincent Lefèvre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)