ETY TeleBot

Top half of result page, displaying the word, its etymology and a share option
Bottom half of the result page displaying mnemonic and a short story
The direct message received by user after search a word on the mini app

Inspiration

I use Telegram daily for studying, group discussions, and sharing ideas. During these conversations, words often come up whose origins are interesting or useful to understand, but looking them up usually means leaving the app. Since ety.ai already provides high-quality etymology, I wanted to bring that capability directly into Telegram, where those conversations are already happening.

The goal was to eliminate friction: no new tabs, no copy-paste, just instant context inside the chat itself.

What it does

ETY TeleBot is a Telegram Mini App that lets users search for a word and instantly view:

Its etymology
A mnemonic (when available)
A short explanatory story (when available)

Results are displayed inside the Mini App and can be shared directly into Telegram chats or groups using Telegram’s native sharing flow. The entire experience stays within Telegram.

How we built it

The Mini App is built using Next.js (App Router) with React client components, optimized for Telegram’s Mini App environment.

The flow works as follows:

The app initializes using @tma.js/sdk to access Telegram launch parameters and user context.
A word search triggers a request to the public ety.ai API.
The response is parsed and displayed in a clean, card-based UI.
Users can share the result back to Telegram using the built-in Telegram share URL or push formatted results into chat via an API route.

The app is hosted on Vercel and launched via the Telegram bot @etytelegrambot.

This project is submitted under:

💬 Track 3: Telegram Mini App

Build a Telegram Mini App that allows users to search, explore, and share ety.ai word results directly in Telegram.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge was handling Telegram-specific context correctly. The Mini App must be opened from inside Telegram to access user data, so fallback behavior had to be carefully managed when the app is opened externally.

Another challenge was formatting shared content so it remained readable once sent into Telegram chats, which required testing Telegram’s formatting and length constraints.

Designing a clean UI that works well inside Telegram’s constrained Mini App view also required simplifying layouts without losing clarity.