What this is
This is a picture dictionary: 585 everyday words, each one drawn as a clear little illustration and translated into 12 languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swahili, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Korean.
A picture dictionary solves a problem a normal dictionary cannot: it lets you look up a word you do not know the name of. If you can point at the thing, you can find it.
How to use it
- Pick your languages. Use the chips at the top of the page to choose up to four. Every picture then shows the word in all of them at once, which makes side-by-side comparison easy.
- Search. Type in the Search tab. You can type in any of the 12 languages and it will find the match — try perro, Katze, mkate or chai. Set Search in to one language if you want to narrow it down. Accents are optional: cafe finds café.
- Browse. Open the Browse tab, choose a category such as Animals or Food & Drink, then a subcategory, and look through the pictures.
- Tap any picture to open the full word card: all 12 languages, romanisation for non-Latin scripts, and a speaker button for each one.
- Study. Star the words you care about, then drill them in Flashcards and test yourself in Quiz.
Good to know
- Genders are included. Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese nouns are shown with their article (la manzana, der Apfel) so you learn the gender with the word, which is the only way it ever sticks.
- Non-Latin scripts are romanised. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Korean each show a romanised spelling underneath. Chinese uses pinyin with tone marks and Japanese uses romaji.
- Pronunciation uses the voices built into your own device. If a language is silent, your device simply has no voice pack for it — nothing is broken and nothing is downloaded.
- Keyboard: press / to jump to the search box, Esc to close a word card, and ← → to move between words while a card is open. In Flashcards, Space flips and → goes to the next card.
Frequently asked questions
- Is it really free?
- Yes. No signup, no account, no trial, no paywall and no limits. Every word and every language is available to everybody.
- Is my data private?
- Completely. Nothing you do here is sent to a server. Your starred words, flashcard progress and quiz scores are stored only in your own browser using local storage, so they never leave your device. Clearing your browser data clears them.
- Does it work offline?
- Once the page and its pictures have loaded, yes — searching, browsing, flashcards and quizzes all keep working with no connection.
- Where do the pictures come from?
- They are from OpenMoji, an open-source icon library, used under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence. Because every icon is drawn in one consistent style, a page of them is far quicker to scan than a mix of photographs.
- How accurate are the translations?
- Each entry was written and checked by hand rather than machine-translated in bulk, and words were chosen to be concrete things that translate cleanly. Even so, many words have more than one valid translation, and regional usage varies — we give the most widely understood everyday term.
