A desktop vocabulary app built for real reading

The vocabulary you actually need shows up while you read articles, study PDFs, work through documentation, and watch videos on your computer — not inside a vocabulary app's word list. A desktop vocabulary app meets those words where they appear instead of asking you to remember them and retype them into a separate place later, where most of them quietly never make it.

Capecho lives on your Mac as a menu-bar tool behind a single global shortcut, so it's available in whatever you're reading — a browser, a PDF reader, a notes app, a video player. Press the shortcut and it reads just the word and its sentence at that moment, then lets you keep going. There's no switching windows, no leaving your place, and no copy-paste detour through another app.

Because capture is one keystroke, building vocabulary stops competing with reading. You save the word on Mac in the flow of the sentence you're in, and your attention returns to the page immediately.

Every capture holds onto the exact sentence you met the word in, because that context is most of what makes a word memorable later. The captured word itself is fixed — the editable surfaces are the context sentence and its gloss — so you can tidy the sentence or adjust the meaning without ever losing the original encounter. When the word comes back to you in review, it arrives in the setting where you first understood it.

When you capture a word, Capecho gives you a real explanation rather than a bare translation: its core meaning and part of speech, its distinct senses, pronunciation per part of speech, and a handoff to the macOS system Dictionary if you want to go deeper. That word explanation is free and unmetered. When you want the meaning of the word as it's used in your particular sentence, that in-context explanation is metered — ten a day, free, unlimited on Pro — and reaching the cap never stops you from capturing, saving, or reviewing.

Saved words don't just pile up in a list — they come back as FSRS spaced-repetition reviews, each fronted by your own sentence with the word in place, surfaced just before you'd forget it. There's no manual card-building; capturing a word is what creates the review. Today both halves of that loop live in the macOS app, so you can capture and review on the same machine.

A phone companion for reviewing on the go is coming, designed so your captures and review history become one library that follows you between your desk and your pocket. And whenever you like, you can export your context-rich cards to Anki or CSV, with a target-language column, since Capecho is a complement to the tools you already trust rather than a replacement for them.

Capecho is tuned first for English as its first quality-validated target, but it isn't limited to it: words in other languages can be captured, saved, and reviewed today, and generated explanations expand to more languages as their quality is validated. The core loop — capture, understand, review — is free, with no subscription on it.