About Word Holder
A personal vocabulary tracker for language learners, built by someone who needed one.
The story
I started Word Holder while learning Italian. Every time I came across an unfamiliar word, I'd look it up, write it on paper, and promptly forget both the word and the paper. I wanted something that would just remember the words I looked up — and let me go back to them later.
That idea grew into Word Holder: a tool that saves every word you search, schedules it for spaced-repetition review so you actually remember it, and lets you organize your vocabulary with tags. It now supports six languages: Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and English.
What it is (and isn't)
Word Holder is a vocabulary tracker, not a translation service or a language course. It's for people who are already reading, watching, or listening in another language and want a better way to hold on to the words they encounter.
You look up a word, it gets saved, and over time you build a personal dictionary of the words you actually need — not a generic word list someone else made. Spaced repetition does the remembering for you: every day the app tells you which words are due and a short review session keeps them moving toward long-term memory — no flashcard creation required.
By the numbers
Word Holder is built on a large, carefully processed dictionary. Type any form — an inflection, a conjugation, an accented spelling — and it resolves to the underlying word. Across the six supported languages it recognises 3.8 million word forms, mapping to 1.6 million headwords and 2.2 million distinct senses.
| Language | Headwords | Senses | Recognised forms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Italian | 111,107 | 191,549 | 571,027 |
| Spanish | 105,799 | 147,103 | 764,962 |
| French | 294,193 | 365,541 | 579,624 |
| German | 193,665 | 238,715 | 438,343 |
| Dutch | 171,957 | 219,718 | 238,386 |
| English | 702,091 | 1,023,756 | 1,198,523 |
| Total | 1,578,812 | 2,186,382 | 3,790,865 |
A headword is a distinct dictionary word with at least one meaning of its own (a lemma, counted once across its parts of speech); a sense is one of its distinct meanings, not counting entries that only point to another word's inflection; a recognised form is any surface spelling — including inflections — that Word Holder can resolve back to a headword. Figures are counted from the dictionary data released on 6 October 2026 (v16) and change as the dictionary is rebuilt. Where the data comes from: data sources & licences.
How it's built
The backend is written in Rust, the frontend in React with TypeScript. Big attribution to Claude, who picked up after the basic functionality was implemented manually in prehistoric times.
It's still evolving. If you have ideas or feedback, get in touch.
Attribution & data sources
Dictionary definitions and examples, autocomplete suggestions, and verb conjugation data are derived from Wiktionary, processed via the Kaikki.org dataset, which is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Word Holder modifies this data — selecting the sense that fits the sentence and enriching entries with AI. Because these derived definitions, examples, suggestions, and conjugations build on the CC BY-SA material, they are made available under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license, with changes noted here.
Reading passages carry their own per-source attribution, shown in the reader. Every source, with its licence: data sources & licences.