Vocabularium draws you the map. Ten minutes of honest yes-or-no answers, and you know how many English words you command, which ones they are, and where the edge of your knowledge falls. Then it puts that map to work on your shelf: pick up any book we have graded and see the exact words standing between you and the story.
Free · no account · your words stay in your browser — nothing is uploaded
Every other vocabulary app hands you a list somebody else wrote and hopes you keep showing up. Vocabularium starts at the other end. It finds out what you already know, word by word, and everything else falls out of that one fact.
Words you know are marked known. Words you are working on sit in a study queue. The list is yours — inspectable, printable, exportable to a file you keep — and it grows for as long as you read.
That ledger is the product. Everything below is what a ledger lets you do.
Point the ledger at a book and it names names. Not a reading level — the actual words, ranked by how much they matter in that book, each with its definition and the sentence where it waits for you.
Print it, learn it, then read the book without stopping.
Great works have on-ramps: a retelling, then a translation, then the thing itself. We measure the vocabulary of every rung and hand you the words each one demands.
So you climb when you are ready, instead of when you are brave.
About a hundred words, yes or no. Some of them are fakes — plausible non-words that make bluffing cost you — so the number you walk away with is a number you can defend.
You get an estimated vocabulary size, your knowledge charted across 12,000 graded words, and your frontier: the place where your reading starts to strain. The 2,000 words every English speaker shares are simply assumed. Nobody drills you on "the."
Choose a title from the reading room and Vocabularium works out how much of it you can already read — then prints what is missing.
Every word is graded from Elementary to Advanced, defined from Webster's, and shown in the sentence where Stevenson or Shakespeare actually used it. The page prints clean and goes on the table.
New words enter a spaced-repetition queue tuned to memory research: each one returns just before you would forget it, then graduates to known and stays there.
Ten minutes a day is plenty. Keep a streak if a streak keeps you honest; watch the bands fill in if you would rather see the map colour.
If you read on a Kindle® e-reader, every word you have ever looked up is sitting in one file on the device — with the sentence you met it in and the book it came from. Drag that file in and the whole hoard becomes study cards. Parsed in your browser; nothing uploaded. How the import works →
Reading research puts the comfort threshold near 98% known words. Below that line a book fights you; above it, the story carries you. A grade level estimates that line for the average child of a certain age. Vocabularium computes it for you — because it knows your words, not your birthday.
Then it does the thing no reading level can do. It prints the words you are missing, sorted by how much they matter in this particular book, each with Webster's definition and the very sentence where the word is waiting. Rum. Ashore. Reckon. Two evenings of study, and chapter one stops being a wall.
Nobody reads Chapman's Homer cold. Every great work has an on-ramp — a children's retelling, a plainer translation, then the original — and each rung asks for more words than the rung below it. A ladder measures exactly how many more, so a reader graduates upward when the vocabulary is there, not when the calendar says so.
On the Macbeth ladder, 73 of the play's study-worthy words are already taught by the Lamb retelling. Read the rung below and you have quietly learned most of what the rung above will demand — which is exactly what an on-ramp is for.
No account, no signup, nothing to install — these pages are simply here. Every list is printable, ordered by how much each word matters in that book, and pairs every word with its Webster's definition and the sentence where it waits for you.
Some readers finish the baseline knowing nearly all twelve thousand words. Good. That only sharpens the real question: how far past the edge of the map does your English actually reach?
About thirty questions on a staircase. Answer right and it climbs toward rarer words; miss and it steps down; the steps halve until they close on your frontier.
It probes to rank 49,530 — far past the twelve-thousand list, out where the words turn strange and specific. Fakes are mixed in, as always. Claiming them collapses your estimate, exactly as it should.
If you know everything below rank nine thousand, you should not have to sit and tick nine thousand boxes.
Pass a twenty-word spot check drawn from beneath your line, and every unmarked word below it is marked known in one stroke. Miss too many and nothing is marked at all — that is the audit doing its job, and it is why the number stays worth having.
The Long Stair is a story in six chapters that climbs as it goes — each chapter reaching further back in time and higher up the frequency ladder, from the present day to the founding correspondence of 1787. Tap the words you are unsure of as you read. The chapter where you start reaching for a dictionary is your altitude. Read The Long Stair →
Every word leads with Noah Webster's American Dictionary of 1828 — morally serious, beautifully written, quoting the same canon your family already reads. Where 1828 is silent, Webster's 1913 answers; genuinely modern words get modern definitions. Nothing gets a lazy one, and every entry wears its source on its face.
Find your true vocabulary size, aim at the exact frontier of your knowledge, and climb the translation ladders until Chapman's Homer reads the way it read to Keats. The ledger is yours; export it whenever you like.
A baseline number per reader for the portfolio, printable word lists matched to the books your children are actually reading, and definitions your curriculum already trusts. No ads, no leaderboards, nothing leaving the house. For families →
Turn a book into a graded vocabulary unit in an evening — context sentences, pages that print clean, and level bands built on real frequency data rather than a hunch about what a fourth-grader ought to know.
"Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language." — Noah Webster, 1828
Ten minutes. A few fake words to keep you honest. A number you will want to beat, and a shelf you can finally aim at.
Take the baseline test