What's included
Picture the Words is an early release. Rather than letting you find the gaps yourself, here is the honest state of every part of it — what works today, what is being built right now, and what is still only planned.
Where things stand
- 5,000 illustrated concepts, across sixteen categories
- Japanese, English, Hindi and French
- All twelve directions between them
- A Grammar category for the function words a picture can't carry — pronouns, postpositions, question words, negation
- Situations: thirty illustrated dialogue scenarios
- Search across every script, forgiving of typos
- Search inside example sentences, not just words
- Audio for word and meaning
- Spaced-repetition review
- Personal notes on any card
- Related words, tappable through to their own card
- Phrases: where one language needs several words for what another says in one — 1,237 concepts, 1,797 phrasings
- Inflected-form tables for 569 verbs, 503 of them showing Japanese, French and Hindi side by side
- Example sentences with context and translations
- Alphabetical browsing, A–Z or あ–ん
- Custom categories of your own
- Offline downloads, by category or all at once
- Lookup on phones and tablets — Reader Mode, Quick Lookup, and a bookmarklet
- Dictionary fallback beyond the 5,000: Japanese, English, Hindi and French
- Browser extension for Chrome, Edge, and Brave — available on the Chrome Web Store
- Wider Hindi and French dictionary coverage beyond the curated 5,000
- Firefox support
- More language pairs
- Reading the site itself in any of the four languages
- Pitch accent for Japanese
- Shared and downloadable decks
- Study statistics and streaks
The two things people ask about most
- The browser extension is desktop only. Extensions of this kind can't run in Chrome or Safari on phones or tablets — a limit of those platforms, not of this extension. On mobile you add the website to your home screen instead and get the same lookups through Quick Lookup, Reader Mode, the Android share sheet, and the bookmarklet. What is genuinely desktop-only is hovering, because it needs a mouse.
- The library is now the full 5,000 concepts. The 4,000 that were in production when this was first written are live, and included in what you've already bought, exactly as promised.
What you get without paying
The visual dictionary is free permanently — all 5,000 concepts in Japanese, English, Hindi and French, unlimited search, look-up and audio, with no account needed just to browse. You can create as many custom categories as you like. The free tier then unlocks your first 200 words per direction — which words you can save a flashcard for, add to review, write a note on, file into a category, hover-lookup in the browser extension, or favourite in the extension. All of those draw from the same 200, not 200 for each. It isn't a trial and it doesn't expire.
Paying removes the 200-word limit for your chosen language pair. Full detail is on the Pricing page.
How this page gets updated
Items move between the three columns as they ship. If something here is out of date, or a feature you were expecting isn't listed at all, that's worth telling me about — get in touch and it will be answered by a person.
Found something broken? Bug reports and wrong translations are the most useful thing you can send. Every report is read, and corrections ship in the next update at no cost to anyone who has already bought a pair.
Last reviewed: .