Vocabulary Frequency Tracker by Calyx

Vocab Tracker turns incidental reading into a structured vocabulary pipeline. Highlight any English or Japanese word on any page, right-click, and it's looked up, counted, and remembered — so you can tell which words you've genuinely encountered often enough to be worth learning, instead of guessing.

• Highlight + right-click → Track. The word is looked up (Merriam-Webster for English, Jisho for Japanese), its dictionary form is resolved automatically, and a small counter badge appears right on the page over the word.
• Encounter it again, the counter goes up. No duplicate entries — inflected forms ("running", "ran") all resolve back to the same tracked word ("run").
• A word bank you can search, sort, and browse from the toolbar popup, with each word shown as a colored badge (a "squircle") displaying its count, part of speech, and definition on hover.
• A built-in "Look Up" tab lets you check any word's definition on demand — even ones you haven't tracked yet — with a one-click "Track" or "Add to Anki" button right on the result.

• Chased definitions. Some dictionary entries just point back to a root word ("the state of being infelicitous") without explaining it. Vocab Tracker detects this pattern and automatically looks up the root word too, showing both definitions together.
• Idiom-aware fuzzy matching. Real sentences don't always match a dictionary's exact idiom wording. If your exact phrase isn't found, Vocab Tracker retries with pronoun normalization and single-word deletion to find the underlying idiom (e.g. "come further into its own" → come into one's own), and clearly flags when this happened.

Connect to AnkiConnect (a free Anki add-on) and export tracked words directly into your own deck — word on the front; example sentence, pronunciation, and definition on the back. Export one word at a time, or bulk-export every word that's crossed your personal "mine threshold" in one click.

• Undo a single tracking with one click if you picked the wrong sense of an ambiguous word (e.g. shake the verb vs. shake the drink) — reduces the count without deleting the word's history.
• Full delete for words you no longer want tracked at all.
• Export/import your whole word bank as JSON, so your data survives reinstalls, browser switches, or moving to a new machine.

1. Install the extension.
2. Get a free Merriam-Webster API key at dictionaryapi.com (free tier: 1,000 lookups/day) and paste it into the extension's Options page.
3. (Optional) For Anki export, install AnkiConnect in Anki, and add "http://localhost" to its webCorsOriginList config so the extension is allowed to talk to it. Full instructions are in the Options page.
4. That's it — no setup is needed for Japanese lookups (powered by the free Jisho API).

Anyone doing extensive reading in a second language, or anyone who wants their vocabulary-building to be evidence-based rather than intuition-based — track real exposure frequency before deciding a word is worth the effort of memorizing it, then export straight into spaced repetition once it earns its place.


All your data (word bank, settings) stays in your browser's local storage — nothing is sent to any server except the specific dictionary/Anki lookups you trigger yourself. No analytics, no tracking, no ads.