An Arabic vocabulary app that
does not mangle the script.

Three failures you have probably already hit

Letters join, so a naive reader crops too tightly and the spaces between words vanish. Two words come out as one, and now your saved entry is a string that exists in no dictionary.

Then there is alignment. Your word sits in a column built for English, flush left, with the punctuation flung to the wrong end of the line. It stays readable, barely, and it feels like being a guest in your own study material.

And the vowel marks. Strip the harakat and a scanner can decide the word is not a word at all and simply refuse it.

Getting the spaces back

When several Arabic words are captured together, Leafy puts the spacing back before anything is saved.

It compares what was read off the screen against the clean sentence it pulled with it, and restores the word breaks from there. Highlighting is tolerant of spacing too, so your word still lights up inside its sentence even when the two do not agree character for character.

This is unglamorous work and it is the difference between a library you can search and a pile of strings you cannot.

Right to left, in the places it matters

Arabic entries are laid out right to left where you actually read them: the word detail view, the example sentence, and the columns of your word list. The app notices the script and flips, so you are not reading Arabic pinned to the left edge of a box designed for English.

Anything with Arabic on it

Press ⌥A and box the word. Leafy reads that patch of screen, so it does not care what put the text there.

A scanned page from a book that has no text layer. A news site. Subtitles in a paused film. A PDF that refuses to be selected. A photo of a sign somebody sent you. None of them need to cooperate.

Arabic sits alongside English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Greek, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Thai, so a page with two scripts on it is not a problem either.

Where your words go

Your library lives on your Mac. No account, no sync server, no ads. The screenshot is read on your machine and never leaves it.

The text you scan does go out to an AI so it can explain the word as your sentence uses it, with nothing attached that says who you are. The privacy page spells out exactly what is sent and what is kept.

One more honest note: Arabic support is newer than the English side, and the Discord is where the rough edges get reported and fixed. If something reads wrong, say so and it gets looked at.

Read Arabic without fighting the tool.

Free while Leafy is in beta. One download, no account, macOS 14 and up.

See what else Leafy does or read why looked-up words never stick.