Questions, answered plainly.

Vocabularium keeps a ledger of which English words you personally know, and then uses that ledger to tell you exactly which words stand between you and any book it has graded.

Three things. Take a ten-minute test that says how many words you know. Open a book list and see the words that book will ask of you, each defined and shown in its own sentence. Study those words in short spaced-repetition sessions until they are yours. Everything else — ladders, the frontier test, the story — hangs off those three.

Yes. The baseline test, the frontier test, all the book and ladder lists, the study queue, and the export button cost nothing, and none of it is behind a signup.

No. There is nothing to sign up for. Your progress is saved in your own browser, and the Export button on the dashboard writes it to a file you keep.

Eleven pages today: eight books and three ladders, spanning Treasure Island, Macbeth (both the Lamb retelling and the play), two translations of the Odyssey, and three books of Greek myth. All public domain, all free to read and print without an account. More get added as they are processed.

Not yet from the website. The book pipeline runs offline for now, which is why the reading room grows a title at a time rather than on demand. Bring-your-own-book is on the list.

A graduated route to a hard book. For Macbeth: Lamb's retelling first, then the shared vocabulary the retelling pre-teaches, then the play itself. Each rung is measured, so you can see how much vocabulary the next step will cost you before you take it. See the ladders →

It is a real estimate, honestly caveated. The method is the yes/no test with pseudowords used in vocabulary research: claim a word that does not exist and your score is adjusted down. It gives a defensible figure and an honest range — not a precise count of every word in your head, which nobody can produce.

Then take the Frontier test. It walks a staircase out to rank 49,530 — well past the main list — narrowing until it finds where your English actually ends. Pass its twenty-word spot check and everything below your line is marked known at once, so you are never ticking thousands of boxes by hand.

Because the 2,000 most common English words are shared by every native speaker of school age. Vocabulary research does not test below that line, and neither do we. They still count toward how much of a book you can read; they are simply assumed rather than quizzed.

In your browser, on your machine. Nothing is uploaded by default. Clearing your browser's site data would erase it, which is why there is an Export button — take a backup file now and then.

No. Imports are parsed entirely in your browser, and we could not see them if we wanted to. There is no account, no tracking of what you read, and nothing sold to anyone.

That was a design constraint, not an afterthought. No ads, no leaderboards, no accounts, no data leaving the machine. Parents review every imported list before anything is saved, and no screen anywhere says "your child did not know this word."

Because definitions used to be written like literature. It is the dictionary of choice in classical education, its examples quote the same canon these books come from, and its public-domain status means we can give you all of it. Where 1828 is silent, Webster's 1913 answers; genuinely modern words get modern definitions. Every entry shows its source.

No — and it is a smaller part of this than the name recognition suggests. The test and the book lists are the foundation. If you happen to read on a Kindle® e-reader, its Vocabulary Builder file is a pleasant shortcut: every word you ever looked up, with its sentence and its book, imported in one drag. How that works →

No. Vocabularium is an independent project. It reads a file from your own device, with your own hands on the cable.