Leafy
Looks up any word on screen with a hotkey, building a spaced-repetition vocabulary list.
Leafy lets you box any word on screen — in a PDF, image, subtitle, or webpage — with a hotkey, and an AI (DeepSeek) reads the surrounding sentence to give the meaning it carries there, not every dictionary sense. Every lookup is saved with its sentence into a local vocabulary list, reviewed on FSRS-5, the same spaced-repetition algorithm Anki uses, with intervals from an hour to ten years. OCR runs on-device; the screenshot is discarded immediately and only the word and sentence ever leave the Mac.
What holds up
- +OCR runs on your Mac and the screenshot is never saved or uploaded — only the word and sentence go out.
- +No account required, so nothing you look up is tied to a name.
- +Free tier exists, and Lifetime is a flat $49 with no ongoing subscription.
Mind the limits
- −Every lookup calls an AI, so the free tier is capped — regular readers will hit the $6.99/month or $49 tier.
- −Definitions come from DeepSeek and can be wrong — the original sentence stays next to each one.
- −macOS only, 14+ — no Windows, Linux, or mobile.
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