About Verbault

Verbault is a literary dictionary and reading tool built on the Project Gutenberg public-domain corpus and the WordNet lexical database. The name combines verbum (Latin for "word") and vault, reflecting our goal: a safe and searchable repository of literary language.

What We Do

Classic literature contains some of the richest vocabulary in the English language, but the words that make it rich are often the words that make it hard to read. Verbault tries to close that gap by bringing together a deep word-lookup tool and a full-text reader in a single place.

When you look up a word on Verbault, you see its definition from WordNet, its reading-level grade (graded against the Brown Corpus frequency ranking), and real example sentences drawn from thousands of public-domain texts. Each example links back to the book it came from, so a single interesting sentence can become a door into a whole novel.

Core Features

• Word lookup with reading-level grading — Every word is placed on an easy / medium / hard / very-hard scale based on its frequency in the Brown Corpus. Definitions come from WordNet, with supplemental entries from Wiktionary for words not covered there.
• The Reader — Upload a text, paste a URL, or open a book from our library. The Reader highlights every word with an inline definition popup on tap or click, translates selected passages with DeepL, and reads the text aloud using a neural text-to-speech engine. You can save any document to your personal vault and return to it later.
• Sentence and book search — Search for a word or phrase across our entire indexed public-domain corpus to see how writers have actually used it. Results include the sentence in context, the book title, and the author.
• Vocabulary lists and bookmarks — Collect words into named lists and bookmark individual sentences for later review. Both are private to your account and accessible from any device.
• Printable worksheets for learners and educators — Generate fill-in-the-blank, definition-matching, word-web, antonym, and category worksheets as printable PDFs. Useful for language teachers, ESL instructors, and self-study learners who want structured practice with literary vocabulary.

Our Mission

Public-domain literature is one of humanity's great shared resources, yet for many learners the vocabulary barrier makes it feel inaccessible. Our mission is to lower that barrier — to make the words of Austen, Dickens, Twain, and Shelley as approachable as a contemporary novel, and to give every reader the tools to grow their vocabulary through authentic, beautiful language rather than flashcard lists.

Verbault is an independent project. We are a small team building something we believe should exist. If you share that belief, we would love to hear from you.