Watching and reading
Movies, TV, news, novels, podcasts. You catch the plot but miss the phrasing — brush off, on the fence, a stretch. Capture them where you met them, with the scene or article recorded alongside, so the memory has a hook.
A one-minute introduction to VocGuru.
English vocabulary that stays
Stop forgetting vocabulary. Start owning it.
You already understand most English. VocGuru helps you capture the missing words, phrases, and idioms you encounter in movies, meetings, the news, and everyday life—and remember them until you can use them naturally.
Free to start · Works in your browser · Reviews and quizzes on Telegram
Built for people who already speak English — and want the other 20%
If you can hold a meeting in English but still lose the joke in a sitcom or the nuance in a client email, the gap is almost never grammar. It is vocabulary: idioms, collocations, and the ten thousand phrases native speakers never had to study.
At work
Engineers, consultants, sales. You know the technical words; what is missing is the register — the phrase that makes a status update sound confident instead of translated. Build the vocabulary your colleagues and clients actually use.
Your words, not a word list
No generic “Top 3000” deck. Every entry is one you chose, in the sense you met it, with your own example sentence. That is why it sticks — and why nobody else's list ever did.
How it works
Four steps. The first takes thirty seconds; the last one happens without you.
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1
Capture it where you met it
Add the word, phrase or idiom with the meaning in the sense you actually encountered, plus the sentence that carried it. Record where it came from — an episode, an article, a client call — and the date. Attach an image, an audio clip or a video excerpt if that is what makes it memorable.
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2
Refine it into a real entry
Split a word into numbered senses and sub-senses, tag its part of speech, and mark how common it is and how hard you find it. Link the words around it: synonyms, antonyms, variants, common phrases, and the ones you keep confusing it with — brush off versus brush up on.
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3
Test yourself properly
The game hides the word inside your own example sentence and asks you to type it. Stuck? Take a hint and letters open up from the outside in — but once hints expose more than 30% of the word, a correct guess counts as a miss. Honest scoring is the whole point. Or take the quiz: multiple-choice questions written fresh for each word — synonym, antonym, meaning in context, fill the blank — with the wrong answers built from words you have actually mixed this one up with.
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4
Get reminded before you forget
Every answer reschedules the word. Remember it and the gap doubles; forget it and it comes straight back. Reviews arrive as batches — in the app, or as a Telegram message you can answer from your phone with
/hintand/revealworking exactly like the game.
Why the reminders are the product
Writing a word down is not learning it. Meeting it again, just as it is starting to fade, is.
You remember it
You forget it
Each correct answer doubles the wait before a word comes back. One miss sends it to the front of the queue. New words and due words are mixed roughly 70/30, so you are always meeting something fresh while the old material keeps cycling — and words you clearly know quietly stop bothering you.
What is in it
Senses and sub-senses
Numbered meanings with proper sub-numbering (1., 2.1, 2.2) — because run is not one word, it is nine.
Examples with provenance
Every example is attached to a specific sense, with where and when you met it. Text, image, audio, video or a link.
Word relationships
Synonyms, antonyms, variants, common phrases, and “often confused with” — linked to your own entries where they exist.
Usage and difficulty
Mark how common a word is and how hard you personally find it, and let that shape what you see.
Encounter history
Every time you meet a word — in the game, in a reminder, in a movie, in a meeting — it is logged, with whether you remembered it.
A quiz, not a flashcard
Multiple-choice questions written for the word in front of you and never stored, so the same word never asks the same thing twice. Wrong answers come from words you have marked as easily confused — getting it right means you can tell them apart.
Telegram reviews and quizzes
Link your account once and reviews come to you. /review hides
the word and takes your guess, with /hint and
/reveal behaving just like the game. /quiz sends
multiple choice and takes a letter back.
Reminders on your schedule
Hourly, daily, twice daily, weekly or custom — pick the days, the send times, the batch size and your timezone.
Search that finds it
Look a word up by term or browse your collection; only the fields that differ from the defaults clutter the page.
Questions
Do I have to type every word in myself?
Yes — and that is deliberate. Deciding which sense you met, and writing the sentence you met it in, is the part that does the learning. It takes about thirty seconds per word, and those thirty seconds are why you remember it.
How is this different from Anki or a flashcard app?
Same underlying idea — spaced repetition — but built around vocabulary rather than generic cards. Words carry senses, sub-senses, sourced examples and relationships to other words. Testing hides the word inside your own sentence instead of showing you a bare definition, and quiz questions are written fresh every time rather than stored, so you cannot end up learning the card instead of the word. Reviews and quizzes both reach you on Telegram, so there is no app to remember to open.
What is a “batch”?
A batch is one review session — a set of words delivered together on your chosen cadence. Scheduling is measured in batches rather than days, so a word that is “due in 8” means eight review sessions away, whether you review hourly or weekly. Skip a few days and nothing floods back at you.
Do I need Telegram?
No. Everything works in the browser; reviews are available in the app whenever you want them. Telegram is there for people who would rather have the review arrive than have to go and get it.
Is my collection private?
Yes. Every word belongs to your account and is only visible to you.
Is it free?
Creating an account and building your collection is free today. VocGuru is young and actively being built — if that sounds interesting, this is a good moment to join.
The next word you look up — keep it.
Start with the one you had to pause the movie for last night.
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