EtymologyExplorer 4+

Unique with a polished UI

Unique way of visually exploring word etymologies. Data comes from Wiktionary and includes a large number of languages besides English. Can get lost in this app for stretches of time. I wish the lifetime membership was on par with other vocab type apps ($20-$30). Overall great job by this sole developer, the attention to detail and thinking that has gone into usability have produced a beautiful app. UPDATE: Saw an offer for lifetime membership pop up in the app a few days after posting the above review, and didn’t hesitate to purchase. Using it daily. Rarely used words who meanings I kept forgetting have now become easily memorized, just by seeing once how the meaning arises from the roots of the word. Brilliant.

Developer Response ,

I truly appreciate that you took the time to leave my app an awesome review, Aquaddict! I hear your request and will consider that in the future. I'm so glad you appreciate my work in creating this app! Please recommend my app to your word friends if you get a chance, and don’t hesitate to shoot me a note at dev@etymologyexplorer.com if you have any questions.

Mostly great

I’m a huge etymology nerd and have spent many many many hours of my life on Wiktionary exploring etymology trees of words across many languages. This app is super exciting to me and offers some features that were either painful or impossible for me to do before, so it’s almost immediately improved my life and I bought the lifetime unlock pretty much right away. It’s a great example of applying fairly simple technology to a problem that ends up providing a ton of benefit.

The iPad app isn’t great, it feels like a stretched out iPhone app, and it has some notable layout issues (especially the family view while in portrait, where part of the display is cut off). The tree view also feels really large and displays very little information on the screen at once. I wish it made better use of the larger iPad screen, especially with long and complex etymologies where scrolling around a lot gets annoying. Horizontal scrolling in the tree is also pretty painful. Even just the ability to zoom out and see more of the tree at once would be awesome. The other feature that I’d really like is the ability to search for words across all or multiple languages. Right now it seems like it’s only possible to search within one at a time and it really limits my ability to find the words I'm looking for.

So, there’s definitely some basic stuff that could be improved, but even in its current form this app is a great supplement in etymological research!

Developer Response ,

Hello glowingrabbits, thank you so much for your feedback. It's so great to hear some constructive suggestions from my users and I'm definitely going to take your comments into account regarding the iPad app. Thank you for your subscription and your support. I'm so glad to read reviews from fellow word lovers like you! If you get a chance, please recommend the app to your word friends, and don’t hesitate to shoot me a note at dev@etymologyexplorer.com if you have any questions. Thanks again!

This is a gem.

So much work must’ve gone into this app it’s incredible. I have a ton of apps on my phone that I’m going through and this was in the mix, that I discovered long after installing. It stood out immediately though and rose raise to the top, I kid you not. I use it for many languages, alongside wordbooks and multilingual translators and polydicts. Thank you so much! I absolutely will consider spending money on this as the developer def deserves it, and I’m sure I will use ot for more than 3 years, which I think is the point which after that it is more advantageous to buy the more expensive option. Love this app!