Why a word needs its sentence

A dictionary tells you what a word can mean. A book needs to know what it means here.

One word, many jobs

Take the English word fortune. Most learners know it as luck. But in the first line of Pride and Prejudice, “a single man in possession of a good fortune” has nothing to do with luck: it means money, a lot of it. A list of definitions gives you both and leaves you to guess which one Jane Austen meant.

Why Tapread sends the sentence

When you tap a word, Tapread sends it together with the sentence around it, trimmed to about 240 characters. A language model reads that sentence and picks the meaning that fits. That’s also why our Privacy Policy mentions the sentence: it has to travel, because the meaning lives in it.

Tap the card for the whole sentence

Sometimes the word isn’t the problem, the sentence is. An idiom, an unusual word order, a tense you haven’t met yet. Tap the card and Tapread shows the whole sentence in your language, along with the word’s other meanings. Whole-sentence translation is part of Tapread Premium.

Keep the words worth keeping

If a word is worth remembering, tap Save word. It’s stored together with the sentence you found it in, because a bare word on a list is easy to forget, and the line where you met it brings the scene back. You can export your saved words for Anki.

It still makes mistakes

The model is right most of the time and wrong some of the time. Tapread is for reading stories, not for legal, medical or safety-critical text.