Kindle Word Wise for language learners: how it works, where it stops, and what readers do instead
Word Wise is a Kindle feature that places a short, plain definition right above harder words in a book while leaving easier words alone. When you are reading in a language you are still learning, that takes away the most tiring part of the process: stopping every few lines to open the dictionary. As one English learner put it on an e-reader forum: "When I first started learning English, reading books with wordwise on was a tremendous help."
The catch is where it actually works. This page covers how the settings work, where the limits are, and how readers online have worked around them. The reader stories below come from posts shared over the years, with the details kept as they described them.
How Word Wise works
- Hints above harder words. A brief definition sits directly over the word so you can catch the meaning at a glance and keep reading. For everything else, the built-in dictionary still works the normal way.
- Fewer or more hints. Inside a book, open the Aa menu and switch on Word Wise. A slider lets you control how many words get hints, from fewer to more. One commenter recommending it to an English learner described it as "like an easy, medium, hard setting". A Chinese tech editor testing a new Kindle in 2016 noted that turning the difficulty up noticeably cut down the number of hints on the page.
- Multiple-choice hints. There is also a setting that shows a list of possible meanings instead of a single definition. One guide calls it confusing and recommends leaving it turned off.
- The hint language. By default, hints are simple definitions in English. That same reviewer in 2016 was also able to switch the hints to Chinese from the Word Wise menu while reading an English book.
Where it stops
According to Amazon's help page, Word Wise only works on English-language books, and not even on all of those. Supported devices listed there are Fire tablets, Kindle e-readers, and the Kindle app for Android. That leaves out a large share of what language learners actually read:
- Books without support. Every Kindle book page on Amazon has a detail line reading either "Word Wise: Enabled" or "Word Wise: Not Enabled". One author who spotted "Not Enabled" on their own book asked a writers' forum if there was a way to turn it on, and the people replying could only guess. If you are buying a book specifically for Word Wise, check that line first.
- Sideloaded books. As a Chinese developer summed it up, on a Kindle, only certain books bought from the store get support. In 2021, people on an e-reader forum noticed that books they loaded onto their Kindles themselves stopped receiving Word Wise data. Another reader figured out that the hint files now seemed to download only when the book was in the user's Amazon Kindle library.
- Any book not in English. Books in French, Spanish, or German get no hints at all. One Kindle owner who wanted Word Wise for another language tried editing the dictionary file in an unofficial tool, only to get garbled symbols in place of definitions.
The learner quoted at the start of this article was one of the people who lost Word Wise on sideloaded books. They wrote that it was "time for me to move on from using wordwise altogether". By then they barely needed it anymore and had mostly left it on out of habit, though Word Wise and X-Ray had been the only reasons they stuck exclusively to Kindles. They were starting to look at other e-readers.
What readers do instead
Long-press and export the vocabulary list. One learner who reads English novels on a Kindle shared their routine: guess an unfamiliar word from context the first time it shows up, and only long-press it when still unsure. Every word you look up is automatically saved to the Kindle's vocabulary builder. From there, they export the list using Kindle Mate and pull it into the Eudic dictionary app to review or print out.
Stick to an English-English dictionary. Another learner read the free fantasy novel Emperor's Edge in the desktop Kindle app. The writing was tough for them at the time, so they looked words up in the built-in English-English dictionary, which they felt made the meanings stick better.
Generate Word Wise for your own files. WordDumb, a free plugin for the calibre e-book manager, generates Word Wise and X-Ray files for your own KFX, AZW3, AZW, MOBI, and EPUB books and sends them over to a Kindle. For EPUB files, it can insert the hints as footnotes instead for readers like KOReader. You can pick the language used for definitions and decide which words count as hard by importing an Anki deck, a CSV file, or your Kindle vocabulary list. It requires calibre 7.1 or newer along with Python, and the files it generates do not work on Kindles signed in with an amazon.cn account. A reader in the 2021 forum thread made the switch and wrote that "it is easy to use and the effect is terrific".
Expect some rough edges. Third-party tools do not behave quite like Amazon's built-in feature. One reader using a different Word Wise script noticed it struggled with inflected word forms: Amazon's Word Wise gives the same hint for both "ambitions" and "ambition", whereas the script did not. The Chinese developer mentioned earlier used another tool to inject hints into MOBI and AZW3 books. Because they wanted to read on a Sony Digital Paper, which only takes PDFs, they wrote a small script to process EPUB files and then converted the output to PDF in calibre, suggesting a GRE vocabulary book as the source dictionary for the hints.
Which to use
- Reading an English Kindle book with Word Wise enabled on a Kindle: just turn on Word Wise and adjust the slider until you only see a few hints per page.
- Reading your own EPUB or MOBI files on a Kindle or in KOReader, if you do not mind some setup: use WordDumb.
- Reading in French, Spanish, German, or another language: Word Wise will not help here. Rely on the built-in dictionary and vocabulary list, or use a reader that glosses other languages.
- Wanting hints in your own native language instead of English: see below.
Where Solaread helps
Solaread takes the same core approach as Word Wise and applies it to the files you already own. After a vocabulary test that takes around two minutes, it places a short translation in your language right after the words you likely do not know, inline with the text. Words you already know are left untouched, and as you save words or mark them as known, fewer words get glossed. If it skips a word you do not know, double-click it to see the translation and save it along with its sentence. It supports books in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese.
It is not a complete Kindle replacement for everyone. There is no e-ink version, and it does not strip copy protection, so a book bought from the Kindle store will only open if you have it as a file you are able to use. You can start in the web app, and there are also apps for Mac and iOS. For a closer comparison, take a look at our page on a Word Wise alternative.
Questions
Does Kindle Word Wise work for languages other than English?
No. Amazon states that Word Wise is only available for books in English, so books in French, Spanish, or German do not get hints.
Why is Word Wise not showing in my book?
It only shows up in Kindle books that support it, so check the "Word Wise" line on the book's Amazon store page; books you sideload yourself usually do not get hints.
How do I get fewer or more Word Wise hints?
Open the Aa menu inside a book, turn on Word Wise, and drag the slider toward fewer or more hints.
Can I add Word Wise to my own EPUB books?
Some readers use WordDumb, a free calibre plugin that builds Word Wise files or footnotes for sideloaded books.