Build a personal word list from any book you're reading

30-second version: Paste any text — a chapter, an article, a paragraph from whatever you're actually reading — into a custom passage, and sayit surfaces the words in it that are genuinely worth learning, ranked rarest-first, each with a definition. Unlike a generic vocabulary list, every word came from something you're already reading, which means you'll meet it again.

Generic vocabulary lists have a structural weakness: they teach words you might need someday, chosen by someone else's guess at what's useful. A word list built from the actual book on your nightstand has the opposite property — every word is one you've already encountered, in a context you understood well enough to keep reading past it, which is exactly the condition under which new vocabulary sticks.

How the extraction works

Paste text into custom passage practice and the app scans it for content words that are rarer than a common-word threshold, filters out anything you've already flagged as too short or too generic to matter, and ranks what's left rarest-first — on the reasoning that the words you're least likely to already half-know are the ones most worth your limited attention. Each surfaced word comes back with a definition, so you're not just getting a bare list — you get a study card generated from your own reading, in minutes, instead of an hour of manually looking words up.

This is the same underlying mechanism behind the vocabulary panel attached to any passage in Read & listen — the identical extraction runs on the library's built-in content, not just on text you paste in.

Why "from your own reading" beats "from a curated list"

Curated lists — Academic Word List, IELTS vocabulary, business English — are genuinely useful for the reason you'd expect: they target vocabulary known to matter for a specific goal. But they're also generic by design, which means some words on any list will already be trivially easy for you, and others won't come up in anything you're actually reading or saying for months.

A list generated from your current book has neither problem. Nothing on it is trivial — it's already been filtered to words rarer than your baseline. And nothing on it is disconnected from real use — you'll meet several of these words again in the next chapter, which is the repetition spaced repetition tries to simulate artificially.

A routine for turning reading into vocabulary practice

1. 1.Paste a chapter or a long paragraph into custom passage practice. Longer text surfaces more candidate words; a single paragraph might only yield two or three.
2. 2.Scan the ranked list. The rarest words are at the top — skim past anything you already know cold, even if the engine flagged it.
3. 3.Say each unfamiliar word before reading its definition. Your own guess is diagnostic — if your pronunciation instinct matches the audio, the word barely needs practice; if it doesn't, that's exactly the word to slow down on.
4. 4.Read the actual sentence it came from, out loud, not just the isolated word — a word's sound and stress can shift slightly with the sentence around it, and reading it in place is closer to how you'll eventually use it in conversation.
5. 5.Save anything genuinely new to a deck — flashcards accepts any word with its definition pre-filled, so the list from tonight's reading turns into tomorrow's spaced review instead of evaporating.

What this doesn't replace

This surfaces vocabulary worth learning — it doesn't replace comprehension. A word you can define and pronounce but never see used again fades regardless of how well you drilled it once; the real retention mechanism is meeting the word again in your next chapter, which only happens if you keep reading the same kind of material.

Try it: paste a paragraph from whatever you're reading right now into Read & listen and see which words come back ranked as worth learning.