selcouth

adj. strange, unusual, rare; unfamiliar; wondrous.

A word game made from literature itself.

Download on the App Store

for iPhone and iPad · iOS 17+

Or play today's passage in your browser

the game, played
A passage from To the Lighthouse with the word abandonment tapped: the dictionary opens to the sense Woolf means — the self-surrender to an outside influence — one of nine the word carries.
every word, defined
The word hunt: each book's rarest word as a trophy to catch — mortify found in Pride and Prejudice, ineffable found in The Great Gatsby, monomaniac still lost in Moby Dick, soliloquy lost in Huckleberry Finn.
the hunt
Your progress: the rank sesquipedalian with a rarity score climbing toward the next rung, a button to continue Dracula, solve streaks, and the word hunt — the rarest words to find, two already caught.
your progress
A commonplace book: kept words and kept passages from the classics, each filed under themes.
your commonplace
Selcouth on iPad: a passage from Jane Eyre with four words hidden, set in a wide reading column, the bank of words waiting below.
and on iPad, laid out for the larger page

About the game

I made Selcouth to spend more time with the authors I love. You get a passage from Dickens or Dostoevsky or Cather with a few words missing and you put them back. Try one, from Pride and Prejudice:

“Nothing is more deceitful,” said Darcy, “than the appearance of . It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.”

Austen wrote humility.

That's the game. Just you and the passage, weighing the words the way the author did.

There's a commonplace book for the words and passages you want to keep; any kept word can be revisited in context, across every book in your library. There are rare words to hunt and ranks to climb, but the passage is the point, not the score.

If you'd rather spend ten minutes with Middlemarch than a feed, this is for you.

— Zach

P.S. No account, no ads, no tracking, works offline. iPhone and iPad, your commonplace synced through iCloud.

The free library

Thirty classics · 9,195 passages, free with the app.

Collections

Themed shelves to add to your library, prepared with the same care. Each is a one-time purchase; the free thirty stay free.

  • Gothic & Weird Poe, Lovecraft, Le Fanu, Radcliffe, Machen, Hodgson — 35 books · 12,708 passages
  • The Russians Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev — 22 books · 8,093 passages
  • The Sea Conrad, Melville, Stevenson, Dana, Shackleton — 29 books · 7,885 passages
  • Story-Books Burnett, Nesbit, Grahame, Montgomery, Kipling, Baum — 41 books · 6,420 passages
  • The English Novel Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Hardy, Eliot, Trollope — 30 books · 11,611 passages

In preparation: The Moderns, The French, and more.