LEXIS
Word by word, we picture the world.
Coming soon to iPhone and Android. Free.
Looking
Same word. A different view.
Everyone sees a word differently. Seeing how someone else looks changes how you look.
Two images, two languages, one word. The third square is yours.
How it works
Pick a word. Go out.
Pick a word
In your own language, or one you want to learn. Every word comes from PanLex, a dictionary of thousands of dictionaries.
Make your image
Literal, associative or drawn. Always square, one per word. An elephant can also be a grey, wrinkled wall.
See the world
Your image is tied to a meaning, so it speaks hundreds of languages at once. And you see how others saw the same word.
From the feed
Images from all over the world.
The word is shown large in the maker's language, with your translation next to it.
Examples from the prototype.
One word
Thousands of languages.
Every image in Lexis belongs to a meaning, not to one language. Here is one word in a few of them.
This word exists in languages.
The goal
Every image makes a language visible.
Nearly half of all languages have fewer than a hundred words on record.
For a big language you make the dictionary richer. For a small one, your image may be the very first. Of the living languages whose status is known, 59% are endangered.
Languages in PanLex, by number of words
What we do and don't do
Simple, and yours.
No AI images
Every image is made by a person. AI never judges whether your image is good enough.
No likes, no rankings
No algorithm looking for you. Just images, and a thank-you if you like.
Your images stay with you
They live on your phone. Sharing with the world is something you switch on, and off.
No ads
Lexis is free and will stay free. No tracking, no cookies, no selling data.
Real words
Only words that linguists have recorded. No free text, so no clutter and no spam.
Every language counts
A word in Goemai (426 words on record) is as welcome as a word in English.
On the shoulders of
Three sources.
PanLex and the Long Now
A dictionary of 7,027 dictionaries: 25,598,007 words, gathered by linguists under the Long Now Foundation, which thinks in ten thousand years.
The Whole Earth Catalog
In 1968 Stewart Brand put the whole earth on one cover. We do the reverse: we build the picture from every word.
John Berger
Ways of Seeing: what we see depends on what we know and believe. Lexis shows you how others look.
Word by word.
Lexis is coming soon to iPhone and Android. Want to hear first, or help build it?