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Your Dictionary Now Knows Word Families

All Saved Words groups your vocabulary into families instead of rows, every word's detail page surfaces its synonyms, antonyms, confusables and topic neighbors, and the Dictionary home suggests what's next — all built on LingoBlend's vocabulary graph, all free.

How-toNikola Artukov6 min read

A dictionary of saved words has always been a list: one row per word, alphabetized, a translation next to each. That's an honest record of what you clicked "save" on, but it's a poor model of what's actually in your head — nobody's vocabulary lives as a sorted column. The app now reads that list the way your brain does: as a network of connected words, and it surfaces the connections in three places.

From two thousand rows to a few hundred families#

Open All Saved Words and there's a new toggle next to the search bar: A–Z or Families. Switch to Families and comer, comí, comida, comedor collapse into one card — a root with its members listed underneath, instead of four unrelated rows scattered across the alphabet.

The grouping runs two of the graph's structures at once. Inflections — comí being a past-tense form of comer — resolve through the same form index that already lets Smart Blend recognize a mastered word in any of its conjugated forms. Derivational relatives — comedor (dining room) sharing a root with comer but not a paradigm — connect through the graph's family edges instead, which is a different kind of link built to catch exactly this case.

The number this produces is usually smaller than you'd guess, and that's the point. Two hundred saved words might genuinely be closer to a hundred and twenty families. That isn't fewer words than you thought you had — every one of the two hundred is still there, still reviewable, still counted in your stats. It's a more honest shape for the same pile: it tells you where you've been building depth on a root (several forms of comer saved) versus where you've only touched the surface (one isolated word with no relatives saved at all), which is a genuinely different kind of progress and worth being able to see. Families view is additive — A–Z is still there for anyone who just wants to scan or search alphabetically.

Every word's neighborhood, one tap away#

Tap into any saved word's detail page and there's a new section: Related Words. It's chips, grouped by relation type, pulled straight from the word's node in the graph:

ChipExample (from comer)What tapping it does
Familycomida, comedorNot saved → one-tap save (auto-translated). Already saved → jumps to that word's own page
Synonymcenar (to dine)Same
Antonymayunar (to fast)Same
Confusable— (see below)Same, plus a note on what distinguishes the pair
Topiccocina, almuerzoSame

This is, concretely, what it means to browse your mental lexicon's neighborhood instead of scrolling a list. You don't have to already know a word exists to find it — you find it by standing next to a word you do know and looking at what's connected. A synonym chip shows you cenar sitting beside comer, which is a different and more useful kind of exposure than meeting cenar cold in a frequency list ranked #340.

The confusable chip is worth a specific mention, because it's the one relation type that isn't primarily about adding vocabulary — it's about a pair you already have. When two saved words are known confusables (puerto/puerta, pero/perro), the detail page flags the pairing directly rather than waiting for you to mix them up in a game first. The review-side handling of confusable pairs — keeping them apart while new, contrasting them once one is solid — is its own feature; see how LingoBlend keeps similar words apart.

Not every word has every chip. A rarely-connected word might show only two or three; a hub word like comer can show all five. Empty categories are simply omitted rather than shown as blank — a page padded with "no synonyms found" for a dozen relation types would bury the connections that do exist.

Because you know comer: recommendations that start from your strongest words#

The Dictionary home has carried a recommendations row for a while; what changed is where the suggestions come from. Instead of a generic frequency list handed to every learner regardless of what they've saved, the row now reads "Because you know comer" and suggests comida, cocina, almuerzo — words sitting one connection away from vocabulary you've already made strong.

The logic is the same insight Blend Engine v2 uses to pick which words to translate: the cheapest place to learn something new is adjacent to something solid. A word connected to one you know well inherits part of its context for free — you already have the root, the topic, or the situation it lives in, so there's less to learn from scratch. A recommendation pulled from a distant, unconnected corner of the frequency list has none of that scaffolding, even if it's technically just as common.

New users aren't left out of this, because there's a fallback with no cold-start gap. Before you've saved enough words and played enough review games to have a real "strongest vocabulary" to branch from, the row suggests curated frequency-ranked starter words for your level instead — the same words a level-aware blend would introduce first. As your dictionary grows, the graph has more of your words to connect from, and the row quietly shifts from level-based to connection-based without any setting to find or toggle. If you're curious what "your level" is actually derived from, we cover the vocabulary-size estimate the app now shows separately.

One more thing worth stating plainly: recommendations aren't a queue you have to clear. Save a suggested word and it drops out of the row on its own — there's no "dismiss" needed, and nothing re-suggests a word you've already added.

Frequently asked questions

Does any of this cost extra, or need a Pro subscription?

No. Word families, Related Words, and the "Because you know X" recommendations are free for every account, on all 17 supported languages. They run on the same on-device vocabulary graph as Smart Blend's personalization, which was built to add zero runtime cost regardless of which feature uses it.

Where exactly do I find each of these in the app?

Word families: All Saved Words screen, the new A–Z / Families toggle next to search. Related Words: open any saved word's detail page and scroll to the Related Words section. Recommendations: the suggestions row on the Dictionary home screen, above your saved words.

I've only saved a handful of words — what happens then?

Families view still groups what you have, even if most cards are single words with no relatives yet. Related Words shows whatever chips a word's graph node carries regardless of your save count. Recommendations fall back to curated frequency-ranked starter words for your level rather than showing an empty row — there's no minimum word count required for any of the three to work.

If I save a recommended word, does it come back later?

No. Once you save a suggested word, it's part of your dictionary and drops out of the recommendations row immediately. The row only ever proposes words you haven't saved yet, so there's nothing to dismiss or clear manually.

Does the app send my saved words anywhere to compute this?

No. The shared vocabulary graph — the map of words and their connections — is downloaded once per language and cached on your device. Which of your words are strong enough to recommend from, and which relations to show on a detail page, is computed locally from your saved words and review history. Nothing about your personal vocabulary is sent to a server to power these three features.

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Nikola Artukov

Builder of LingoBlend. Writes about reading as a way into a language — the methods, the research behind them, and the practical workflows that make them fit into an ordinary week.

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