uLexis app for iPhone and iPad

Lexis is the first app ever published to help students of Ancient Greek learn their vocabulary.

Based upon an intuitive flashcard system, Lexis provides students with more than 5000 words, ranging from the most basic to the unfamiliar and rare ones. The main idea behind Lexis is to use a database of words from a huge corpus and to order them by the frequency of their occurrence. As students are, most of the time, being asked to translate documents written in Ancient Greek into their mother tongue, I believe that teaching the most frequent words will help them along their studies and will improve their grades dramatically.

By using complex machine-learning algorithms, the ‘Intensive’ learning mode is well-suited for students desiring to learn fast and efficiently in the long run. Each lesson consists of words adapted to the students level and gets more and more difficult as the student progresses. In case of unfamiliarity with a word, the latter gets flagged and becomes more likely to appear in subsequent lessons again.

Progress and learning efficiency are then calculated and plotted in two graphs for statistical - yet strictly private - usage, depicting to what extent a student has progressed since the app was first used.

On the other hand, the ‘Revision’ mode allows students to check their knowledge and revise the words they should already know. This mode is particularly appreciated as a preparation for examinations.

Nonetheless, if a student does not want to learn vocabulary through adapted lessons, Lexis also provides, in the ‘Classic’ learning mode, a list with more than 250 lessons, each of which consists of 20 words sorted by their probability of occurrence.

Indeed, for both learning modes as well as the revision mode, the translation of each word may be retrieved through small definitions, even offline. However, those are often insufficient or inaccurate for punctilious students. This is why I also provide access to two well-known dictionaries, namely the Liddell-Scott-Jones as well as the ‘Bailly. The latter may also be downloaded on demand, and thus is accessible offline.


µLexis is the trial version of Lexis: The database consists of only 500 words for the Learn mode whereas only 24 lessons are listed in the Classic mode. All the other features (‘Learn mode, ‘Revise’ mode, ‘Classic’ mode, statistics and dictionaries) are always available.

The purpose of this trial version is to motivate candidates to study Ancient Greek by offering them a preview of the more challenging version of Lexis.