LeX
Personal vocabulary builder
Inspiration
Vocabulary has always been a weakness throughout years of school. It has never been terrible, and I certainly was able to cram for the SAT reading section very well. However, it has never been satisfactory.
The most difficult part of improving my vocabulary is the amount of overhead I needed to do in order to just learn new words. I've tried multiple vocabulary building application, but they were all focused on training vocabulary for exams or particular professions. It seems that there's extra, unnecessary effort required just to pick up foreign words you read everyday.
Lex is meant to fulfill that need (for me personally, anyway). It takes usability inspiration from [Google Dictionary][gd] Chrome plugin, but it also stores the words you look up, thus building a personal vocabulary list from scratch very easily. I believe, because the words chosen are from your personal readings, the context will greatly affect your memory of the words.
User Story
To illustrate certain functions, consider the following mock user story.
Dan is browsing a NYT article online. He finds words whose meaning he does not know. He double clicks on the word and a dictionary entry appears around the word. The word is automatically saved to his LeX account. He repeats the process for the rest of the article. When he visits his LeX account, he'll see a list of words taken from the article, along with the context in which the words appeared, and other information related to the word (definition, parts of speech, pronunciations, etc.). He can tag them into separate groups. He can ask to be quizzed - flash cards or other methods.