u/Thin-Lawfulness-7861

Leafy is a Mac app for looking up and learning words without leaving what you’re reading.

Press ⌥A, select a word anywhere on your screen, and Leafy OCRs the text around it.

The key is context.

Instead of giving you a long list of dictionary definitions, Leafy sends the word together with the surrounding sentence to AI and gives you the meaning that fits what you’re actually reading.

Every lookup is automatically saved with the sentence it came from. So you don’t just end up with a list of words you barely remember. Each word keeps the context in which you found it.

When you review a word, Leafy brings back the original sentence with the word hidden. You fill it in using the context you originally encountered, with no flashcard setup or manual word lists.

Works with PDFs, ebooks, screenshots, video subtitles, image-only text, and pretty much anything else on your screen.

Currently:

• macOS 14+
• Menu bar app
• No account or ads
• 10 languages, including Greek, Thai and Arabic
• Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, PDF or Anki
• AI-powered contextual lookups
• Your saved words and data stay on your Mac
• Usage statistics can be turned off
• Free during beta
• How to get it

Upvote Leafy on Product Hunt and leave a comment within the next 48 hours.

🎁 Get free early access, normally $49. Product Hunt.com / leafyapp.uk

Leafy is a Mac app for looking up and learning words without leaving what you’re reading.

Press ⌥A, select a word anywhere on your screen, and Leafy reads it with OCR. It works with PDFs, ebooks, screenshots, video subtitles, and pretty much anything else on your screen.

Instead of giving you a long list of dictionary definitions, Leafy gives you the meaning of the word in the sentence you’re reading.

Every lookup is saved automatically, along with the sentence it came from. Over time, Leafy builds a personal vocabulary list from the things you actually read.

When you review a word, you see the original sentence again with the word hidden. No separate flashcard setup, no manually building word lists.

Currently:

• macOS 14+
• Menu bar app
• No account or ads
• 10 languages, including Japanese, Chinese and Arabic
• Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, PDF or Anki
• AI-powered lookups
• Your saved words and data stay on your Mac
• Usage statistics can be turned off
• Free during beta
• leafyapp.uk

It’s still in beta, and I’m mainly looking for feedback on how people actually use it.

I originally made Leafy for myself to save vocabulary while reading papers.

Then a couple of med student friends started using it for terminology, and now they probably use it more than I do.

The idea is pretty simple: highlight a word anywhere, whether it’s a lecture slide, PDF, Anki, or a webpage, and Leafy saves it together with the sentence around it.

Later, you can review your own words, or export them to Anki and use spaced repetition without having to build every flashcard yourself.

There’s also a No AI Mode if you don’t want AI involved. You can keep your own notes and pull them up directly in the window you’re working in, which is handy when you’re looking at a case and want to quickly check something you’ve saved before.

Mac only for now, free during beta: get Leafy

If you’re in med school, I’d genuinely love to know what’s missing for your use case. The terminology load is on another level.

I built a small Mac app for saving vocabulary while reading. Some med students have been using it for clinical terminology, so I want to lay out what it actually does in case it's useful here.

You highlight a term anywhere on screen, Epic, a PDF, lecture slides, and the definition shows up on top of what you're already looking at. Nothing gets copied out, no second window, you stay in the chart.

There's a no-AI mode. Turn it on and nothing leaves your machine, it works with wifi off. In that mode it only pulls from the list you saved yourself. So if you've written down that NAEON means no acute events overnight, that's what comes up, in your words, not a guess. When an abbreviation means different things in different specialties you decide what the entry says.

You can import a list you already have as a CSV instead of retyping it. Terms you save keep the sentence they came from, and you can export to Anki.

Mac only for now, free to try: https://leafyapp.uk/

I didn't build this for med school, so if you're on rotations I'd like to know where it falls short.

Nothing big but helped many people in reddit! Really happy

What’s new:

• Faster word lookup
• Improved PDF scanning
• Better context detection when saving words
• Various UI polish and bug fixes

Leafy helps you build a personal vocabulary library from the things you actually read on your Mac, instead of isolated word lists.

If you’re learning a language through articles, books, or academic papers, I’d love to hear what you think.

Website: leafyapp.uk

I have built a website for our leafyapp, but from a user's perspective, will this be a bit confusing to download? Because I have seen another Mac tool app's website that is really clean, and straight to the download page with nothing else.

leafyapp.uk

my friend has been doing this for years lol, keeps all his vocab in notes app with little definitions and comments. honestly thought it was kinda genius until he lost half of it when he accidentally deleted the list..

been looking for something that actually lets you organize words properly, like tag them, search them, add context. couldn't find anything so i just started building one (but its was a fail)

ngl it's been live for a few weeks and basically nobody uses it lol. i think the problem is it's hard to explain why you'd want this over just... a notes app. like the screenshot above is fine? it works. but then you lose it, or you can't search it, or you want to group words by topic and suddenly you're making 12 different notes and it gets messy

idk maybe the problem i'm solving isn't real enough for most people. or the landing page sucks. probably botht's called leafy,if anyone wants to check it out. still pretty early but it does the core stuff

Hi r/MacOSApps, I made Leafy because premade decks never worked for me. The words I actually need are the ones I run into while reading.

So that's what it does. You highlight a word in any app, browser, PDF, anywhere, and Leafy saves it with the sentence you found it in. Over time you get a vocab library built from your own reading, and it quizzes you on it with spaced repetition.

No deck downloads, no card making.

It's free to try: https://leafyapp.uk/

I'd love feedback on two things: does the capture flow feel natural, and what would make you keep using it past week one?

anyone else look up a word, forget about it, then see it again 5 weeks later in a different class and have to look it up again because there's no record you ever saw it before? happens to me all the time across different subjects.

apple's Look Up is fine for quick stuff but it doesn't work on video at all, and even when it does work there's nowhere to actually save the word, so I just end up copy pasting into Notes until it's an unreadable mess I never open again.

ended up building a small mac tool that OCRs whatever's on screen including video, saves it into folders, and exports to anki. been live 2 months, only 17 downloads, not sure if that means nobody else has this problem or if I just did something wrong

how do you guys actually deal with this, or does everyone just copy paste into notes and never look at it again lol

I’ve been learning languages on my Mac by reading a lot of articles, PDFs, and papers, and I kept running into the same limitation with existing tools, so I built my own.

What I wanted in one app:

1. Capture unknown words instantly while reading, without breaking flow. Click any word in PDFs, articles, or web pages and save it with its original sentence for context.
2. Build a real vocabulary dock instead of a flat word list. Everything stays tied to where it came from, so recognition actually improves when you see it again.
3. Keyboard-first workflow. No switching apps or disrupting reading.
4. No generic flashcards or forced review system. Vocabulary comes from real usage, not predefined decks.
5. Searchable vocabulary history. I often remember the sentence before the word, so full-text search across saved context matters.
6. Works across anything I read on Mac: PDFs, articles, academic papers, web pages.
7. The goal is simple: turn reading into continuous vocabulary accumulation instead of repeated dictionary lookups.

If you want to try it or give feedback, it’s here: https://leafy-web.binjto.workers.dev/#signup