Notes are kept in this browser on this device. A backup file carries them to another device.
On a phone you can also press and hold the image to save or send it.
English uses the spelling you picked from the strip or typed on a keyboard. A word written only by its sounds shows its English when exactly one word has those sounds; a word that shares its sounds with another (see, sea), or sounds that make no word, come out as sounds between slashes. Pasting English into this keyboard brings back the Stemsyl, and a backup file keeps everything.
You can also paste straight onto the page. Each word becomes its sounds; a word that isn’t in the word list is skipped, and you can spell it with the keys.
Up voiceless · centred the family’s sonorant · down voiced. The families run round the colour wheel from the tongue tip to the back of the mouth, so a misread lands on a related sound.
The vowels take six rainbow colours plus grey, two each: red a · eye, orange ah · ow, yellow e · ay, green i · ee, blue u · oo, grey uh · aw, violet oh · oy. Centred is the plain vowel, up glides to i, down glides to u.
Every key is one sound. The note groups the sounds of a word into syllables by itself: each vowel takes the consonant just before it on its left and the one just after it on its right. Any other consonant stands on a short stub of its own.
After the sounds of a word, the strip above the keys offers the English words that sound like it, and longer words that begin with it. When exactly one English word has the sounds you wrote, its spelling goes under the glyphs and into Copy English by itself. Words that share their sounds with another (see, sea; to, two, too) stay as sounds until you tap one — except eye alone, which is always I, and uh alone, which is always a. After the ◆ name mark, names count too, so Jon and John wait for your choice. Tapping a longer word finishes the word; the note itself shows only the sounds.
The ◆ key is the name mark: it goes before a name, where English uses a capital letter. Numerals are dice on a 3 × 3 grid — count the lit squares.
There are two layouts, switched at the top of the keyboard. Keys has a key for every sound. 3 × 3 asks for a tick position first, then its colour; hold its centre for numbers, punctuation and cursor keys, and swipe sideways across it to move the cursor.
Type English. Each word turns into its sounds when you press space, Enter or a punctuation key. A capital letter in the middle of a sentence adds the name mark. Digits type numerals. Arrows move the cursor; ⌘/Ctrl-Z undoes.
This app is free software: you can share and change it under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, and it comes with no warranty. Its word list is also offered on its own under CC BY-SA 4.0, and the Stemsyl writing system itself is dedicated to the public domain (CC0 1.0), so anyone may use, teach and build on it.
Words: every word of the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary and of the English Speller Database’s American list at size 80 — 271,173 in all. Pronunciations (General American, written in Stemsyl sounds): 117,746 from the CMU dictionary; 102,503 built from those by regular endings, prefixes and compounds (abjured from abjure, aboveground from above and ground); and 50,924 rarer words and names predicted by eSpeak NG (GPL-3.0), with a second guess from Kyubyong Park and Jongseok Kim’s g2p model (Apache-2.0) where the two nearly agree. Predicted pronunciations are usually right or one sound off.
Word order: Hermit Dave’s FrequencyWords, counted from OpenSubtitles 2018 and licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Words it never counted follow, the commoner speller lists first. Offensive words are kept out of the longer-word suggestions, partly using the LDNOOBW list (CC BY 4.0); they can still be written by their sounds.
Copyright (C) 1993-2015 Carnegie Mellon University. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. The contents of this file are deemed to be source code. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. This work was supported in part by funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation of the United States of America, and by member companies of the Carnegie Mellon Sphinx Speech Consortium. We acknowledge the contributions of many volunteers to the expansion and improvement of this dictionary. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY NOR ITS EMPLOYEES BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
English Speller Database (ESDB, previously SCOWL) Copyright 2000-2026 by Kevin Atkinson Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell any part of the English Speller Database (ESDB, previously known as SCOWLv2), or word lists created from it, is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both the above copyright notice and this notice appear in supporting documentation. Kevin Atkinson makes no representations about the suitability of this database for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.