WordHoard is a daily reading habit for people who like language. It holds 1,320 entries across seven kinds, and every one of them is already inside the app.
Words (400) — uncommon but usable English.
Idioms and Phrases (200) — figurative English, with the origin attached.
Etymology (200) — ordinary words with a stranger history than you expect.
Latin Phrases (211) — the Latin that still lives inside English, tags and sayings alike.
Maxims (89) — aphorisms and proverbs, in plain English.
Named After (120) — words that were once a person or a place.
Untranslatables (100) — what other languages have and English has to borrow.
Switch on the kinds you want. A morning of nothing but words reads differently from a morning of Latin and untranslatables, and both are allowed.
THE DAILY SET
Each day the app sets out a small handful of new entries, drawn from the kinds you chose. Four by default, or one if that is all the time you have. Read them with a coffee and close the app, or follow the links and stay an hour.
WHAT EVERY ENTRY CARRIES
- Pronunciation, written in IPA and read aloud by your device
- A plain meaning, written to be understood on first reading
- An example of the word doing real work in a sentence
- Where it came from, and how it reached English
KEEPING THEM
Entries you have read come back for review shortly before you are likely to forget them: days later, then weeks, then months. There are short multiple-choice quizzes if you would rather be asked than told, and a streak if you want one, with freezes for the days that get away from you.
No feed. No league table. Read four, or read forty.
THE REST OF IT
- The whole corpus, browsable A to Z, and search across all of it
- Filter a list down to the entries you have already marked as known
- Save anything, and keep it in lists of your own naming
- A private note on any entry, up to 500 characters
- Export your saved entries and notes to a file whenever you want them elsewhere
- A home-screen widget carrying the day's entry
- Share cards, for when a word is worth passing on
- One daily reminder, at a time you set, with quiet hours — or none at all
- Light and dark, adjustable text size, and a choice of reading typefaces
Words, idioms, etymology, Latin and maxims — with meaning and origin.