Free English tools

The three tools

• Verb conjugator

  Type a verb, get all twelve tenses, the three principal parts and a drill for each one. Irregulars come from the same reviewed table as our verb list.

  144 irregular verbs · 12 tenses

• English text to speech

  Paste your own writing and hear it read back, one sentence at a time, at a speed you choose. Useful for checking a sentence you cannot say.

  Speed 0.5×–1.5× · per-sentence replay

• Word counter + CEFR level

  Words, characters, sentences and reading time — plus an estimate of the CEFR level a learner needs to read the text, from our own levelled catalogue.

  9,278 levelled words

What these three tools are for

Most free English tools online are the same tool with a different logo. A word counter counts words; a conjugator conjugates; a text reader reads. There is no reason for any of them to be attached to a school, and mostly they are not. These three are, and that is the only interesting thing about them.

The verb conjugator is built on the same reviewed irregular-verb table as our irregular verbs list, so the past participle it shows you is the past participle our A2 lesson teaches. Not a similar one from somewhere else — the same one, from one file.

The text-to-speech reader uses the speech helper that already pronounces the 5,500 words in our vocabulary catalogue and the sound tables on our pronunciation pages. It is the same voice, at a speed you choose, reading your own writing instead of ours.

The word counter is the one that could not exist anywhere else. It counts what every counter counts, and then it tells you which CEFR level a learner would need in order to read the text comfortably — by checking every word in it against our own levelled catalogue and the levelled stories and exercises we publish. Nobody else in English language teaching can do that with their word counter, because nobody else has that list attached to it.

What we did not build, and why

The most searched-for tool in this family, by a wide margin, is a free English grammar checker. We have not built one and we are not going to build a bad one.

A grammar checker that works is a language model with a cost per request and a failure mode that has to be explained to the person using it. A grammar checker that does not work is a handful of regular expressions that flag their for there, mark half of them wrong, and are read as authoritative by exactly the learners least able to tell that they are not. On a site whose entire proposition is that the English on it is correct, shipping the second thing to catch the traffic would cost more than the traffic is worth.

So there is no grammar checker here. If you want your writing checked, the honest answer is a person: our placement test includes a written section, and every lesson on the site is written to be marked. If we ever do build one, it will be a paid feature with a stated model behind it and a disclaimer on every result, not a page built to rank.

No sign-up, and nothing leaves your browser

All three tools run entirely in the page. There is no account, no email box, no free trial and no upload. The verb table and the levelled word list are downloaded once with the page, the same way a stylesheet is, and every calculation happens on your own device afterwards.

That is worth saying plainly because it is unusual: a lot of "free" online tools are a form that posts your text to a server. If you paste a paragraph of your own writing into a box on the internet, it is reasonable to want to know where it went. Here it went nowhere. Open your browser's network panel while you use any of these three and you will see no request at all after the page has loaded.

Frequently asked questions