English vocabulary for iPhone

Learn English words in the glances you already take.

VocabPeek puts one English word on your Lock Screen and Home Screen — pronunciation, meaning and an example — and changes it as often as you like. Words you know, you send away for good. Words you are still learning come back when they are due.

Get VocabPeek — freeHow it works

iPhone, iOS 18 and later · Free to start · No account needed

Two VocabPeek Home Screen widgets for “resilience”, with pronunciation, meaning, an example sentence, synonyms and the buttons Known, Save and NextAn iPhone Lock Screen with VocabPeek showing “resilience”, its pronunciation and the meaning “the ability to recover quickly after difficulty” under the clock
11,485English words, from everyday to advanced
15levels, from A1 to beyond C2
4languages for meanings, plus English definitions
1 a dayreminder by default — or none

How it works

Three habits, no lessons to fall behind on

  1. 1

    Start at your level

    Three rounds of twelve words: tap the ones you already know. VocabPeek places you at the right level, and the words you tapped go straight to Known.

  2. 2

    Put a word where you look

    Widgets for the Lock Screen and every Home Screen size. The word changes every 30 minutes, hour, 2, 4 or 6 hours — your choice, with quiet hours at night.

  3. 3

    Glance, then decide

    Tap Known and the word never returns. A word you have seen but not marked comes back after 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 days, then retires.

The VocabPeek word card for “resilience”: part of speech, pronunciation with a speaker button, meaning, example, synonyms and an I know it button

The widget is the lesson

  • Known, Save, Next right on the Home Screen widget, without opening the app.
  • Hear it with the speaker button, in the voice built into iOS.
  • Meaning in your language Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean or Traditional Chinese, next to the English definition — or English only.
  • A review widget that asks you to pick the right meaning of a word you have met.
  • Six practice games in the app when you want more than a glance.

The words

Common words, graded finely

No made-up words and no rarities for show. Each CEFR band is ordered by how often the words appear in Google Books, then cut into levels — and a level never mixes two bands.

BandLevelsWords
A11–2882
A23–41,206
B15–72,137
B28–102,415
C111909
C212873
Advanced13–153,063

Two extra sets: Academic, for IELTS and TOEFL (958 words), and GRE/SAT (2,774 words).

Counted from the app’s word database on 6 November 2026.

Where they come from

Words and levels, A1–B2
The CEFR-J Wordlist Version 1.5, compiled by Yukio Tono, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
C1–C2 words
Octanove Vocabulary Profile C1/C2 1.0 by Octanove Labs (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Academic set
New Academic Word List by Browne, Culligan and Phillips (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Senses
Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0)
Word frequency
Google Books Ngram 1-grams (CC BY 3.0)
Pronunciation
CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon University

What we are careful to say

Definitions, examples and translations are written by a language model once, when the word list is built, following each word’s WordNet senses. Every word card has a button to report a wrong meaning.

Words, progress and your own lists stay on your iPhone and in your iCloud. There is no account to create.

Pricing

Start free, unlock every word when you are ready

Free

The most common words of every level, the widgets and the placement check.

VocabPeek Pro

Every word in all 15 levels, the Academic and GRE/SAT sets, all six practice games and the Journey, unlimited personal lists on the widget, every photo and accent colour.

  • $7.99 a month
  • $39.99 a year
  • $79.99 once

US prices; the App Store shows the price in your country. No free trial, so nothing renews by surprise.

One word now. Another in an hour.

Add VocabPeek to your Lock Screen and let the words come to you.

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