How Word Holder Works
A vocabulary tracker with built-in spaced repetition. Look up words while reading, and the app schedules them for review so you actually remember them.
1. Read something. Click words.
Get a text into your library using Import text on the home screen. There are three ways to start, shown as tabs:
- Sample passage — pick from a small built-in library of short, reading-level-graded texts in your language. The fastest way to start — no article to find first. (This is the default the first time you import.)
- From URL — paste the link to an article and Word Holder extracts the readable text.
- Paste text — drop in text from anywhere: a book chapter, a blog post, a message, anything.
Whichever you choose, the text opens in a clean reader with comfortable typography.
While reading, tap any word to see its meaning:
- A short translation appears instantly, pulled from Wiktionary-based dictionaries (fast, free).
- Tap See full definition to load the AI-generated long definition when you want more depth.
- If the word has multiple possible meanings (like Italian letto — "bed" or the past participle of "to read"), you'll get a lemma picker so you can choose.
- Words you've already tapped get a subtle dotted underline when you re-open a text, so you can see what you've already covered.
Every tap saves the word and the sentence it appeared in — the sentence comes back as context when the word shows up in your daily review.
Anonymous accounts get 100 KB of text storage; signed-in accounts get 5 MB. The meter is visible on the library and import pages.
The right meaning, in context
Most words carry several meanings. Take English bank: in "We sat on the bank of the river" it's the edge of the water, but in "She put the money in the bank" it's the financial institution. Tap bank in each sentence and Word Holder highlights the meaning that actually fits — not the same generic list both times.
Tap a word and Word Holder reads the surrounding sentence to pick the meaning that fits — so you don't have to scan six definitions for the one the author meant.
When the sentence is genuinely ambiguous, we show you the options instead of guessing. This works best in the curated reading passages — and any text you read in the app — where the surrounding sentence is there to read.
Built-in reading passages
Don't have anything to read? The Sample passage tab on the Import text screen has a curated set of short texts for your current language, each tagged with a reading level so you can match the difficulty to where you are. Pick one and you're reading — and saving words — within seconds.
Some passages come as a series — a longer text split into parts you read across several sessions. Word Holder remembers where you stopped and offers Continue so you can pick a longer story back up later.
And some classics come as graded story adaptations: the same story retold at three levels (A2, B1, B2) — most also offer the untouched original when you're ready for it. Look for the Stories shelf in the passage picker. A level switcher in the reader header lets you change level mid-story: same story, same ending, and every word you've saved stays saved.
Don't know what to read? Use "Help me choose"
On the Import text screen, switch to the URL tab and click Help me choose (next to the URL field). A picker opens with a curated list of reading sources for your current language, grouped by News, Culture, Science, Sport, and Easy reading. Each source shows its difficulty and whether it's usually free or mixed access.
Two ways to use it:
- Open site — opens the source's homepage in a new tab so you can pick an article yourself, then paste the URL back into the URL tab.
- Random link — grabs a fresh article from that source (picked from a backend-maintained pool) and feeds it straight into the import flow — no browsing required. Great when you just want something to read right now.
Sources are curated for every supported language. The backend refreshes the article pool every few hours and only keeps links that our article extractor can actually read, so the "Random link" button almost always lands on a usable page. Fair-use cap: 5 Random link picks per 24 hours per account — Open site stays unlimited.
Explain this form Experimental
If the word's meaning isn't what's tripping you up — you roughly know what it means but not why it's written like this — the popover has a second Explain tab with a short grammar note for that word in that sentence. Italian and Spanish only at the moment.
Available to everyone — the popover always shows the Explain tab next to Meaning. Because it's still experimental, it may be slower than Meaning, change without notice, or disappear.
What you'll see
When the explanation is ready, three short sections:
- In this sentence — what the clicked form is doing right here (e.g. \"fosse" is subjunctive because the clause expresses doubt).
- Why this form — the mechanical reason (clitic fusion, article contraction, past participle with auxiliary, etc.).
- Compare — a one-line contrast with the simpler or nearby alternative ("glielo" vs "lo", "del" vs "di + il").
Follow-up chips
Below the three sections you may see up to three pill-shaped buttons. Tap one to re-ask about the same word from a different angle without closing the popover:
- Break it down — split the form into its component parts.
- Literal meaning — the word-for-word reading, ignoring idiom.
- Why this tense? — focus on tense choice in this sentence.
- Why subjunctive? — focus on mood choice.
- Why this pronoun? / Why this article? — focus on the pronoun or article specifically.
- Why this word order? — focus on sentence-level word order.
Other messages you might see
- "Nothing unusual here — standard form for this sentence." — there's no remarkable grammar point to call out; keep reading.
- "Couldn't explain this form right now." — the call failed or timed out. Hit Retry.
2. Or type a word in the search box
You can also look up a word directly from the home screen — useful when you're not reading a specific text. Type it in, pick your language, press Enter. If you type a conjugated form, it finds the base word automatically. Not sure about spelling? You'll get suggestions, ordered so the most common words come first. Multi-word entries work too — useful for English phrasal verbs like look up or Italian expressions like a proposito.
The search box also knows what you've already saved. As you type, matches from your own collection appear first, under In your words — and they match meanings too, so typing dog surfaces a saved cane. Pick one and it opens instantly, without running a fresh lookup. Dictionary suggestions you've saved before carry a small ✓ Saved mark, and pressing Enter on a word that's already in your list simply opens it. This works the same in the search box on the home screen and the one on My words.
3. What's in a definition
Lookups happen in two phases: a short translation appears instantly so you can keep reading, and a richer explanation loads in the background when you want more. When you open the fuller view, a definition can include:
- Senses with examples — each distinct meaning gets its own example sentence, so an abstract definition has something concrete attached.
- Synonyms and antonyms — grouped per sense, to give you a feel for the word's neighbourhood, not just its translation.
- Noun plurals — shown right next to the headword, with the gender per form where it matters: Italian lenzuolo → i lenzuoli (m.) / le lenzuola (f.). Plurals appear in every language except English, which shows only irregular ones (children, mice) — regular +s plurals would just be noise.
- Real example sentences — sentences drawn from a large corpus of authentic text (the Leipzig Corpora Collection, CC BY), for every supported language, with English translations where available.
- Register badges — archaic and rare senses are de-emphasized and pushed down, so the meaning you'll actually meet while reading stays at the top.
- Idiomatic senses are grouped together and kept last.
Make the dictionary yours: pin, hide, note
Once a word is saved and it has more than one meaning, each meaning on its full definition carries two small controls — and the card itself takes a note:
- Pin this meaning (the thumbtack) — tells Word Holder this is the meaning you care about. Reviews quiz only the pinned meaning, and its translation leads the word's row in your list. Pin a different meaning to switch; tap the filled pin to unpin.
- Hide this meaning (the crossed-out eye) — removes a meaning you don't want from the definition and from reviews. Nothing is deleted: hidden meanings collapse into an "N hidden meanings" expander at the end of the entry, where Unhide brings any of them back. The last visible meaning can be pinned but not hidden.
- My note — a personal free-text note on the word (a mnemonic, a false-friend warning, where you met it), shown under the definition. Words with a note get a small note marker in your list, and during review the note appears only after you've answered — so your mnemonic doesn't give the answer away.
Pins, hidden meanings, and notes sync across your devices. A new device shows your pinned meanings and note markers right away with the word list; hidden meanings and the note text follow the first time you open each word.
Verb conjugation tables
Look up a verb and Word Holder shows its full conjugation table right on the word card — no separate page to hunt for. Tap a verb like Italian parlare or Spanish hablar and you can see how it behaves across tenses without leaving what you were reading.
- Irregular verbs carry a badge, so you know when a form is one you can't guess from the rules.
- Spanish stem-changing verbs get their own marker on the card.
- English and Dutch show the simple past — the form learners most often trip on.
4. Your word list
Every word you look up — whether by tapping in the reader or typing in the search box — is added to your personal list on the My words page. The page opens with your collection at a glance: the word count, status chips for Due, Learning, Mastered, and New — each appearing once its group has words; tap a chip to filter the list to that group — a progress bar showing how many of your reviewable words have entered review (words you've excluded from review don't count) — with mastered words as their own segment once you have some — and, whenever anything is due, the button to start a review.
Below that — once your collection has grown past a handful of words — the filter, sort, and the tag filter sit together: the filter narrows the list by word or translation, and you can sort by most recent, alphabetical, or most looked up. If the filter comes up empty for a word you don't have yet, a one-tap shortcut offers to look it up in the dictionary instead. Click any word to open its full definition. A word's row also reflects your curation: a pinned meaning's translation leads the row, and a small marker shows on words that carry a note.
Use the level control to adjust how much detail an expanded definition shows:
- Simple — just the English translation
- Standard — definitions and example sentences
- Immersion — full detail in the original language
Difficulty band. Each word shows a coloured letter on the right of its row indicating how common it is in the language — based on its corpus frequency rank, where rank 1 is the single most common word:
- A — Basic: top 200 most common words
- B — Intermediate: ranks 201–1000
- C — Advanced: ranks 1001–5000
- D — Rare: rank > 5000 (or not in the frequency list at all)
Hover the badge to see the exact rank. Same thresholds across all languages. The home dashboard rolls these up into an Active vocabulary by difficulty panel showing how many words you've looked up at each band over the last 7 days, 30 days, and year — useful for noticing whether you're coasting on basics or pushing into harder vocabulary.
5. Organize with tags
Click the + button on any word to add a tag (e.g. "Chapter 3", "Travel", "Food"). Then filter your word list by tag using the dropdown in the toolbar.
Tagging a whole reading session? When adding a tag, tick "Also tag words I look up next" and every new word you save — from the search box or by tapping words while reading — gets that tag automatically, handy while working through a chapter. A status pill on the word-list page shows while it's armed, with a one-tap Stop.
6. Daily review (spaced repetition)
Every word you look up enters a spaced-repetition schedule. The app tells you how many words are due today on the home screen, and a 2-minute review session is enough to keep words moving toward long-term memory.
Reviews are fill-in-the-blank: you see an example sentence with the word hidden, recall it in your head, then rate how well you remembered it:
- Again — I forgot. Resets the interval to 1 day.
- Hard — I struggled. Shorter next interval.
- Good — I remembered. Standard SM-2 progression.
- Easy — Too easy. Longer next interval.
Words you remember reliably get spaced further apart (1d → 6d → ~15d → …). Words you struggle with come back sooner. Once a word's interval reaches ~90 days it counts as mastered and shows under the Mastered chip in your word list — until it comes due again, when it moves under Due for its next review.
If you tapped the word inside a text you were reading, the review uses that same sentence for context — so you're quizzed on words in real prose you've seen before, not generic dictionary examples.
Why did the hint change? (meaning rotation)
If a word has several meanings, its review card doesn't quiz the same one every time: between reviews the card rotates through the word's meanings, so the translation, example sentence, and hint may describe a different sense than last time. Each of the main, learner-relevant meanings gets its turn before any repeats. If you'd rather drill one meaning only, pin it on the word card (see section 3) and reviews stick to that meaning — and hidden meanings never appear in reviews at all.
Cards also show where they came from, with a small badge: Lookup cards come from dictionary lookups and rotate as above, while In context cards are created when you tap a word in a text you're reading — when Word Holder can identify the exact meaning you met in that sentence, the card stays tied to it, and it keeps its own schedule either way. A word can have both.
Every card also offers Don't show this word again (instant, with an Undo) and Report a problem, just below the grading buttons. And if you've written a note on the word, it appears once the answer is revealed.
When you finish the due cards (or have none today), the review screen offers a Practice option to revisit non-due words anytime — practice sessions don't change the schedule.
7. Quiz yourself (sentence quizzes)
A separate feature from daily review. After saving 4+ words, go to the Quizzes page and generate an AI-powered sentence quiz using your recent vocabulary. Three quiz modes are available:
- Drag & Drop — drag words into sentence blanks
- Multiple Choice — pick the right word from four options
- Type In — type the missing word yourself
Sentence quizzes are good for varied practice; daily review is the retention engine.
Languages
Word Holder supports Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Bulgarian, and English as learning languages. Definitions are available in English. See the languages page for the current list and roadmap.
Your account
Word Holder works without a visible login — every visitor gets an anonymous account automatically, so lookups, reviews, and the spaced-repetition schedule all work from the first visit. Log in (Google or email) to keep your words permanently and sync across devices. Without an account, your progress is tied to this browser only.
Signing in also unlocks the larger text storage quota (5 MB vs. 100 KB anonymous) so you can keep a bigger reading library.