When your child taps a word in a book, a small card opens with the word, a button to hear it, and a short meaning where we have one. For the few words a book was written to teach, marked with a dotted line, the card gives the meaning the story uses.
The other meanings come from a short list of words that often come up in stories, each written by a person for a young child. We are building a larger children's dictionary, described below, and the cards will use it once it is ready.
Written for their age
Each meaning in our children's dictionary is written three times, for ages 5 to 7, 7 to 9 and 9 to 12, and your child sees the one for their age group. There is an example sentence with most of them.
The dictionary is written in American English. If your child's books are in British spelling, set in their reader settings, the cards use British spelling and British everyday words too.
How the meanings are checked
- Every meaning is checked against a published English dictionary, to make sure it explains the right sense of the word.
- Every meaning goes through the same safety checks as a page of a book.
- A meaning that does not pass every check waits for a person on our team and is not shown until they approve it.
- Words about private parts of the body, violence, unkind words and grown-up topics are only explained once a person has read the meaning. Slurs and sexual words are never explained. For those, the card shows the word and the button to hear it, and nothing more.
Words with no meaning yet
Some words do not have a meaning yet. The card still says the word. When that happens we count the word, so we know which meanings to write next. We keep the word and how many times it was asked for, and nothing about which child asked.
Reading offline
A book kept on a tablet to read offline keeps the meanings of the words it was written to teach. Other words are said, with no meaning, until the tablet is back online.
See Keeping books on a tablet to read offline.
Where the dictionary comes from
The dictionary is built from three open datasets, which we credit on About our dictionary.