Why the words you look up
never stick.

Everyone starts a word list

A note on your phone. A spreadsheet. A flashcard deck you set up on a Sunday with real intentions.

Mine got to about two hundred words. I opened it a year later and could not tell you what most of them meant. They were not hard words. I had understood every one of them at the moment I wrote it down.

A plain word list is a list of things you understood once. That is a different thing from knowing them, and the gap between the two is where most vocabulary study quietly dies.

A word does not carry its own meaning

Look up run on its own and you get fifty definitions. Run a business, run a fever, run for office, a run in your stocking. Only one of those was the one you needed.

Something told you which one. It was the sentence.

Then you copied the word into your list and left the sentence behind. When the word comes back a week later it arrives with no situation attached, so your brain has nothing to hook it to. You get the dictionary's answer instead of yours.

This is also why premade decks feel so lifeless. Somebody else's sentence is somebody else's memory.

Keep the sentence

Save the sentence that was sitting around the word, not only the word.

That is the entire idea, and it is annoying enough to do by hand that almost nobody does it. Select the word, copy it, find the sentence, copy that too, switch to your list, paste both, get back to your book, find your place. Nobody keeps that up past the third word.

So Leafy does it in one keystroke. Press ⌥A and box the word. It reads the line around it, looks the word up in that specific sense, and files both away. Your eyes stay on the paragraph.

Works over PDFs, ebooks, subtitles, scanned pages, images, anything on screen. Nothing to fill in afterwards either. The catching is the whole step.

Your own sentences, not a word list

Say you were reading by a river and hit effervescent. A dictionary hands you "giving off bubbles; fizzy" and also "vivacious and enthusiastic", and leaves you to guess.

What Leafy saves is the water was effervescent, and for a moment the whole current seemed to lift and breathe. Now the word has a river attached to it. When it turns up again you get the sense you actually needed, and a bit of the morning it came from.

Two hundred of those is a record of what you actually read. That is worth opening a year later.

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. If that matters to you, and it should, the privacy page spells out exactly what is sent and what is kept.

Stop looking up the same word.

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

See what else Leafy does or read why we built it.