Type the word exactly as it appears in your reading. You don’t need to know the dictionary form first — that’s what this is for. Macrons are fine, and j/v or i/u both work.
Type an English word and you’ll get the Latin words that can mean it. Simple, common words work best — try carry rather than transporting.
Every result has three parts
- The dictionary form in red — how the word is listed in a dictionary. For amaverunt that’s amo, amare, amavi, amatus. This is what you write in a vocab list.
- What it means — love, like.
- What your form is doing — perfect active indicative 3rd person plural. The grey line underneath says what that means in ordinary English: who is doing it, and when. Here, “they” are doing it and it already happened — so, “they loved.”
If a word shows several forms, Latin spelled them the same way and only the sentence tells you which one is meant. Read the plain-English notes and pick the one that fits.
Make a vocab list
Type or paste one Latin word per line. The meanings and principal parts fill in automatically from the dictionary, so a bare list of words is enough. To write your own meaning instead, use porto = to carry.
My list
0 wordsPractice it
Why the practice works this way — worth two minutes
- Recall before you look. Trying to remember, and failing, teaches more than re-reading the answer. That’s why the card asks you to say it out loud first.
- Spread out over days. Words you get right come back later and later; words you miss come back soon. Cramming feels better and works worse.
- Missed words return on a steady gap — about five cards later — rather than at the end of the round. Even spacing beats stretching the gap for what you still remember next week.
- Mixed practice. Jumbling meanings, endings, and word types is harder in the moment and stronger later than drilling one thing at a time.
- Common words first. Around a thousand core words make up roughly 78% of Caesar and 70% of the Aeneid, so they repay study far more than rare ones.
- Say what it reminds you of. The back of each card shows the Latin stem and asks what English words come from it — making the link yourself is what fixes it.
Based on research on retrieval practice (Roediger & Karpicke), spacing (Cepeda et al.), interval schedules (Karpicke & Roediger 2007), interleaving (Rohrer & Taylor), and core-vocabulary coverage (Dickinson College Commentaries). Latin reading fluency still comes mostly from reading a lot of Latin — this is for the vocabulary and forms that make the reading possible.
Try to answer before you check — the attempt itself is what builds the memory, and getting it wrong does no harm here. Every word you miss is rescheduled to come back sooner; every word you know is pushed further out.
Macrons
A macron marks a long vowel — ā ē ī ō ū. It is not decoration. It separates words that are otherwise spelled identically, and it is how you can see a case ending or a tense that the bare letters hide.
| Same letters | Means | With a macron | Means |
|---|---|---|---|
| liber | book | līber | free |
| malum | evil | mālum | apple |
| os | bone | ōs | mouth, face |
| venit | he comes | vēnit | he came |
| latus | side | lātus | wide |
| populus | a people | pōpulus | a poplar tree |
| hic | this man | hīc | here |
| puella | the girl (subject) | puellā | by/with the girl |
Looking a word up here does not require macrons — Verba ignores them when it searches, so amāvī and amavi both work. You need them for writing.
First · can your keyboard make one?
The United States-International keyboard the school recommends for French and Spanish cannot produce macrons. There is no long-vowel accent on it. For Latin you need one more keyboard, and you switch to it with Windows + Space.
How to add the macron keyboard
You are adding the Hawaiian keyboard. That sounds odd for a Latin class, and it is — but it is the one Windows layout that puts long vowels on Alt Gr without changing anything else. Every letter, digit and punctuation mark stays exactly where it is printed. Nothing downloads, and this works on a school laptop without an admin password.
- Press Windows + i to open Settings.
- Go to Time & language › Language & region.
- Click Add a language, search for Hawaiian, and add it. (Do not change your Windows display language.)
- Press Windows + Space to switch to it, then run the test above.
The whole layout, in five keys
Hold Alt Gr and press the vowel. Add Shift for the capital. Nothing else on the keyboard changes.
016B then
Alt + X does give you ū,
and it is fine when you are writing in Word. It is a Word feature, though — it does nothing
in a browser, and nothing inside LockDown Browser. A keyboard layout works everywhere,
including in a quiz.Practice
Type the Latin exactly as shown, macrons and all. Pasting is off — the point is the keys.
Language tools
Free, made here at Regis Jesuit, and they run entirely in your browser — no accounts, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Dictionary and morphology by William Whitaker (1936–2010), released for free and unrestricted use. Parsing logic ported to JavaScript from blagae/whitakers_words (MIT), after Whitaker’s original Ada program mk270/whitakers-words. Everything runs on this page — nothing you type is sent anywhere, and it keeps working offline.
For Latin practice beyond looking words up, teachers and students should also visit Magistrula — a separate site, built by a Latin teacher, well worth your time.