Help with Dictionary Genie

Every pronunciation is shown in more than one notation so you can use the one you can read:

• IPA — the International Phonetic Alphabet, precise and standard, e.g. /əd.ˈvɛn.tʃɚ/. Best if you have learned it.
• Familiar respelling — the word broken into chunks of its own spelling, with the stressed chunk in capitals, e.g. ad-VEN-ture. Easiest to recognise, because it still looks like the word.
• Sound-first respelling — the sounds spelled out with a fixed key rather than the original letters, e.g. uhd-VEN-cher. More accurate when the spelling lies, which in English is often.

Syllable boundaries are shown separately. Choose which style is shown first in Settings › Pronunciation; the others stay one tap away on the entry. If the familiar respelling would be misleading for a particular word, the app shows the sound-first form instead.

Use the dialect selector on the pronunciation block of any entry, or set your default in Settings › Pronunciation › Dialect. US and UK pronunciations are stored as separate records, so switching shows genuinely different data rather than a relabelled version of the same one. Where a word has only one recorded dialect, only that one is shown.

Some words are heteronyms — they are said differently depending on the part of speech, like the noun and the verb record. In those cases the app stores one pronunciation per part of speech and labels each one, so you can see which sense you are looking at.

Yes. Tap the play button on the pronunciation block to hear it, and use slow play to hear it at a reduced rate. Audio is produced by the iOS speech synthesiser using the voice installed on your device, so it works offline and follows your system voice and speaking-rate settings. If nothing plays, check that your ringer is not silenced and that a voice for the language is installed in iOS Settings › Accessibility › Spoken Content.

There are two different kinds of translation in the app, and they add languages differently.

Word translations come from the dictionary that ships inside the app, covering 22 target languages. They are already there, they work offline, and there is nothing to download. Pick the ones you want to see in Settings › Languages.

Sentence translation in the Translate tab is performed by Apple’s Translation framework using the language models on your device. Choose the pair you want; if the model is not installed, iOS offers to download it, and you accept once. After that the pair works offline too. You can manage the models you have downloaded in the iOS Settings app under the Translate settings (the exact path varies slightly between iOS versions). The list of pairs the app offers is read from the system at runtime, so it always matches what your device can actually do — if Apple adds a language, it appears without an app update.

If you decline the download, the rest of the entry still works; only sentence translation for that pair is unavailable, and the app says so.

The bundled dictionary carries translations into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Dutch, Polish, Ukrainian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai, Swedish, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Coverage varies by word, because it depends on what the source data records for that word: common words are translated widely, rare ones less so. Where the source gives grammatical gender or a transliteration, the app shows those too.

Not in version 1.0. The interface and the dictionary are English. Translations out of English into the languages above are included, but there is no French-to-English direction and no localised interface yet.

Four widget kinds, in five shapes:

• a small widget showing the Word of the Day;
• a medium widget showing the Word of the Day and the Latin Phrase of the Day together;
• Lock Screen widgets in the rectangular and inline shapes;
• a configurable widget you can point at the daily word, the daily phrase, or a review item from one of your saved lists.

To add one, touch and hold the Home Screen or Lock Screen, choose Edit or Customise, add a widget, and pick Dictionary Genie. To change what a configurable widget shows, touch and hold it and choose Edit Widget.

Widgets are refreshed by iOS on its own schedule, and it throttles that schedule to save battery. Opening the app once updates the shared snapshot the widgets read from, which normally fixes it immediately. If it persists, remove the widget and add it again.

Yes. The app provides a “Look up a word” App Shortcut that opens straight to an entry, usable from Siri, from the Shortcuts app, and as a step in your own shortcuts. Words you have saved are also indexed for Spotlight, so searching your device finds them and tapping the result opens the entry.

Settings › Notifications in the app. You can enable a reminder for the Word of the Day, for the Latin Phrase of the Day, or both, and choose the time each should arrive. The app asks iOS for notification permission only at the moment you switch the first one on — never at launch. Turning them all off stops the app asking anything of the system again.

You can also revoke permission at any time in iOS Settings › Notifications › Dictionary Genie. If you do, the in-app switches will show as unavailable until you grant it again.

No. They are local notifications: your device schedules them and delivers them itself. There is no push service, no device token and no server that knows you exist. That is also why they keep working with no connection.

Reminders are scheduled against your local time and are rescheduled when your time zone changes; open the app once after landing and the schedule is rebuilt. Quiet hours, which you set in Settings › Notifications, are respected in the new time zone too.

No. The streak is a count, not a currency. Nothing is deducted, nothing is locked, and missing a day does not delete anything you saved. You can see the full archive of past daily words and phrases whenever you like.

Settings › History. You can pause recording so nothing new is stored, swipe to delete a single entry, or clear the whole history at once. Deletion happens on the device immediately and is permanent — there is no copy anywhere else, because history is never uploaded.

Not in version 1.0. There is no account and no cloud sync, so favorites, lists and notes live on the device that created them. Deleting the app deletes them. If you use encrypted iOS device backups, they are included in your own backup and restored with it.

Yes, completely. The dictionary is inside the app rather than on a server, so search, entries, pronunciations, examples, the thesaurus, word translations, the daily content and widgets all work in aeroplane mode. The one exception is the first time you use a sentence-translation language pair whose Apple language model is not yet on your device: that download needs a connection, once.

A setting that filters example sentences and content the source data labels as vulgar or offensive. It is a filter on presentation, not censorship of definitions: a word that exists in the dictionary is still defined. Turn it on or off in Settings › Safe search.

Open the entry, tap Report, and choose what is wrong. The app prepares an email in your own mail app, already filled in with the word, the sense, the source identifier and your app and pack versions. Nothing is sent until you press send, and you can edit or delete anything in the draft first.

If you would rather not use the in-app action, email alend@omniadataanalytics.com with the word and what is wrong.

Because our content comes from open datasets, a correction usually takes one of two routes: for a data error we record an editorial override that ships with the next content update, and for an error that also exists upstream we fix it upstream as well so everyone benefits. Corrections to pronunciations are checked against our style guide before shipping.

From openly licensed lexical datasets: English Wiktionary, Open English WordNet, the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Tatoeba and wordfreq, plus our own editorial notes for the daily word and phrase. Every definition, example, pronunciation and translation in the app carries the identifier of the dataset it came from, and the entry screen shows you that attribution.

No content is generated by a language model, and nothing is taken from a commercial dictionary. The full attribution and the licence for each source is on the Sources & licenses page.

The dictionary covers common and moderately common English words, and includes rarer words when a recognised source records them. Very new coinages, extremely technical terms, brand names and most proper nouns are outside it. If a word you expected is missing, tell us — coverage thresholds are something we tune between releases.

If the word is there but you typed it differently, search should still find it: it tolerates missing accents and apostrophes, matches inflected forms back to the base word, and falls back to fuzzy matching for typos.

The whole dictionary ships inside the app so that nothing depends on a network or a server. That is the size. It is not removable, because it is the product. In exchange there are no downloads to manage, no subscription, and no lookups leaving your device.

That means the bundled content file could not be read, which usually points to an interrupted install or low storage. Free some space, then delete and reinstall the app from the App Store. Your saved words are not preserved by a reinstall, so if you can still open the Saved tab, note anything important first. If it happens again after a clean reinstall, please email us with your device model and iOS version.

Yes. Every control is labelled for VoiceOver, pronunciation blocks are read out as a single sensible phrase rather than character by character, and the layout adapts through the largest accessibility text sizes. Reduce Motion is honoured, tap targets meet the 44 pt minimum, and an external keyboard can be used to navigate on iPad. If you find something that does not work with an assistive technology you rely on, please tell us — we treat those reports as bugs, not requests.

It is free, with no in-app purchases, no subscription, no advertising and no data collection. The content is openly licensed, the app has no servers to pay for, and there is nothing to monetise about you. There is no catch to disclose.