Understand a word beyond translation

A translation hands you one equivalent and stops. That is enough to keep reading, but it rarely sticks, because a lone equivalent is a fact with nothing attached to it. An AI word explanation does more work: it lays out the word's major meanings in plain language, names its part of speech, and shows how the senses relate — so you leave understanding the word, not just having matched it to one foreign-language token.

This is the difference between word meaning beyond translation and translation alone. Capecho is not a translator and does not try to be one; it is the layer that explains, so the word arrives as something you can reason about rather than a label you will have forgotten by the next paragraph.

Most words worth saving carry several related senses. Think of a word like 'charge' — a fee, an accusation, a rush forward, an electrical state — collapsed by a single translation into whichever sense the translator guessed. Memorize that one and the word breaks the next time it appears differently, because you learned a coincidence, not the word.

Capecho's explanation keeps the few genuinely common senses together and shows how they connect, turning a flat lookup into a small, memorable map. A handful of linked meanings is far easier to recall than one isolated definition, and it means the word still makes sense when you meet it somewhere new.

The word explanation is the free, unmetered core of Capecho. It opens with a concise core meaning and the part of speech, and behind a calm expand it carries the word's distinct senses — the noun against the verb, for instance — each with per-part-of-speech pronunciation in IPA. It is a compact, AI-authored explanation, not an exhaustive every-sense dump.

When you do want the full reference — every rare sense, dictionary-style examples — a Dictionary button hands off to your Mac's own system dictionary instead of Capecho rebuilding one. The explanation is written by AI under prompts constrained to authoritative sources rather than invented from thin air, so explaining a word's meaning with AI does not mean trusting made-up facts.

The meaning of a word is the same for every reader, so Capecho generates each word's explanation once and serves it from a shared public cache. Your own sentence is never part of that cache — the explanation is built from the word alone — which is exactly what lets it stay free and unmetered no matter how much you capture.

There is a separate, metered extra: the in-context explanation, which reads the word as used in your specific sentence (10 a day, free, unlimited on Pro). It costs per use because it cannot be shared, which is why it is metered. The word explanation itself — meaning, senses, pronunciation, the Dictionary handoff — is free and never counts against any limit; Pro also lifts the free tier's 200-saved-word library cap.

Understanding a word once is not the same as remembering it. In Capecho the explanation is saved alongside the word and the exact sentence you captured it in, so nothing has to be looked up twice.

When the word echoes back as a spaced-repetition review — fronted by your own sentence, scheduled by FSRS — the understanding returns with it. And if you keep your cards elsewhere, Anki and CSV export are available anytime, so the explained, context-rich word is never locked in.

Capecho is built first for English and validated there first, but it was never designed to be English-only: the captured unit and your sentence are language-neutral, and glosses render in several languages so you can read a meaning in the language you think in.

Generated word explanations expand to more target languages as each one passes its own quality check, which is a deliberate gate rather than a limit — a word's explanation is shown to every user, so it earns the wider rollout by proving it is accurate first.