EtymologyExplorer

This app has a Feedback page that is better than possibly any I’ve ever seen. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s like a glorious moment on a screen that was created to be user friendly, and actually helpful to the user, it’s like I’m back decades ago in the early days of apps before ads and subscriptions and repeating chatbots or no actual way to provide feedback at all despite a million useless options to search through—it’s got none of that (ok I did pay for a subscription), it’s just nice and clean and simple with good usability! This is literally the first review I’ve ever written for an app, here’s hoping things keep going well when they answer my question

Unique way of visually exploring word etymologies. Data comes from Wiktionary and includes a large number of languages besides English. Can get lost in this app for stretches of time. I wish the lifetime membership was on par with other vocab type apps ($20-$30). Overall great job by this sole developer, the attention to detail and thinking that has gone into usability have produced a beautiful app. UPDATE: Saw an offer for lifetime membership pop up in the app a few days after posting the above review, and didn’t hesitate to purchase. Using it daily. Rarely used words who meanings I kept forgetting have now become easily memorized, just by seeing once how the meaning arises from the roots of the word. Brilliant.

I’m a huge etymology nerd and have spent many many many hours of my life on Wiktionary exploring etymology trees of words across many languages. This app is super exciting to me and offers some features that were either painful or impossible for me to do before, so it’s almost immediately improved my life and I bought the lifetime unlock pretty much right away. It’s a great example of applying fairly simple technology to a problem that ends up providing a ton of benefit. The iPad app isn’t great, it feels like a stretched out iPhone app, and it has some notable layout issues (especially the family view while in portrait, where part of the display is cut off). The tree view also feels really large and displays very little information on the screen at once. I wish it made better use of the larger iPad screen, especially with long and complex etymologies where scrolling around a lot gets annoying. Horizontal scrolling in the tree is also pretty painful. Even just the ability to zoom out and see more of the tree at once would be awesome. The other feature that I’d really like is the ability to search for words across all or multiple languages. Right now it seems like it’s only possible to search within one at a time and it really limits my ability to find the words I'm looking for. So, there’s definitely some basic stuff that could be improved, but even in its current form this app is a great supplement in etymological research!