“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Dictionaries - from cuneiform tablets to online and app - not much has changed in the way weve learned and referenced words over the centuries. Today, entire tomes of definitions lay at our fingertips, ready to be called on within seconds notice and yet we still often fail to express ourselves effectively. We’ve outsourced our lingual capacity to the digital world only to find that we’re living in an increasingly desolate vocabular landscape. If Mark Twain were alive today the following quote would likely give away his thoughts on how we communicate:
“Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest spectacle? - the burning of Rome in Nero’s time, for instance? Why, it would merely say, Town burned down; no insurance; boy brast a window, fireman brake his neck!. Why, THAT ain’t a picture!"
That sure looks like it fits into 180 characters.
For those of you out there that can find a common thread with Marks sentiment, this one’s for you.
WordReminder takes on a whole new approach to dictionarying. It provides the basic components of any dictionary app, mainly, searching for words, with a little bit of its own flavor on top of that. It allows you to save words that matter to you to your word collection and quickly reengage with them any time you open the app. Beautiful, full screen word displays make it a pleasure to follow up on a definition and simple swipe gestures enable you to swiftly go through your collection. That in itself is not enough though - to make sure you’re engaged with your collection WordReminder will periodically send you reminders with definitions. That way you’ll always be interacting with your words and using them more often, which in turn will help you memorize them and their meanings.
This is only the beginning, we’ve got many more features coming so stay tuned! In the mean time, if you have any feedback, do send it our way.
Enjoy these vocabulary related quotes whilst you’re downloading the app:
“The limits of my language are the limits of my universe” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up.” - Charles Harrington Elster
“We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology’s virtues” - Alberto Manguel
“A vocabulary is reduced, so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but also experience. Man grows by language. Whenever he limits language he retrogresses!” - Sherl S. Tepper
“A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one” - Baltasar Gracian
“I collect words—they are sweets in the mouth of sound.” - Sally Gardner