Frequently Asked Questions

PlainSpell covers five languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German. Every entry includes definitions, IPA pronunciations, part-of-speech tags, etymology, and usage examples, where available in Wiktionary.

All word data comes from Wiktionary via kaikki.org, which provides structured JSON exports of Wiktionary entries. Wiktionary is the free, collaboratively edited dictionary maintained by millions of contributors worldwide. Content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Confusable pairs are sets of words that are frequently mixed up due to similar spelling, pronunciation, or meaning, like 'affect' vs 'effect', 'principal' vs 'principle', or 'their' vs 'there' vs 'they're'. PlainSpell provides curated explanations of the key differences for commonly confused pairs.

Homophones are words that sound identical but have different spellings and meanings, such as 'to', 'too', and 'two', or 'bare' and 'bear'. PlainSpell groups homophones together using IPA pronunciation data extracted from Wiktionary.

IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system for representing speech sounds across languages. IPA notation like /ˈwɜːrd/ gives a language-independent way to show exactly how a word is pronounced, useful when learning across multiple languages.

IPA pronunciations are contributed voluntarily by Wiktionary editors. Many words, especially less common ones in non-English languages, may not yet have IPA entries in Wiktionary. Coverage improves over time as contributors add pronunciations.

All definitions, pronunciations, etymologies, and examples are compiled by our editorial team from Wiktionary contributors' work. We do not invent or paraphrase entries, we structure and format them for readability. PlainSpell is a curated presentation of existing Wiktionary data, with light formatting and cross-language indexing.

We download Wiktionary exports periodically from kaikki.org and rebuild our database. Wiktionary is continuously updated by contributors, so our database reflects a snapshot of Wiktionary at the time of each update.