Support

Shakespeare Flashcards

Using the app

Flipping a card

Tap anywhere on the card to flip between the word and its definition. The definition side also shows the part of speech.

Sorting words

Tap Known or Learning at the bottom to file the current word into that list. The next word appears immediately.

Undoing a mistake

Swipe from left to right across the card. The last word you sorted goes back to the top of the list it came from, and a short "Undone" confirmation appears. You can swipe repeatedly to step back through several decisions.

Seeing every word

Tap the title at the top of the screen — "Known Words" or "Learning Words" — to open a scrollable list of every word in that list with its definition, part of speech and corpus frequency.

Questions

Where do the words come from?

They are the 1,000 highest-ranked content words in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a one-billion-word corpus balanced across eight genres. Function words such as "the" and "of" are excluded because they are not useful as vocabulary cards.

Where do the definitions come from?

Princeton University's WordNet 3.0. Each definition is WordNet's first listed sense for that word in its tagged part of speech. For a word with many meanings this is not always the most common everyday one.

Why does the same word appear twice?

Some words are common as more than one part of speech. "Right" as a noun and "right" as an adjective are genuinely different vocabulary items, so they appear as separate cards.

Does the app need an internet connection?

No. Everything is bundled in the app and it works fully offline.

Is my progress backed up?

Your Known and Learning lists are saved on your device between sessions. They are not synced to any server and are removed if you delete the app.

Sources

Word frequencies: Corpus of Contemporary American English, compiled by Mark Davies.
Definitions: WordNet 3.0, Princeton University.