Parola - Words Worth Keeping

Parola iOS App Icon
A new word every day, framed in a hand-drawn stamp: 木枯らし, the cold wind that strips the trees in late autumn.
Onboarding starts with words, not forms. Pick five you like, especially ones you've never heard.
You've been collecting words all along, from books, films, conversations and places.
Give every word your own meaning. It's the moment that made you keep it.
Make little worlds out of words with collections, each in its own colour and shape.
Your picks become your first collection, each word next to what it means to you.
Every word in its own script: 森林浴 set vertically, with pronunciation and origin.
Every form, not just the headword: a Polish noun with all its cases, kept from where you heard it.
Every word remembers where you found it: a book, a film, a trip, or Parola itself.
Share any word as a card, designed to be kept rather than scrolled past.
A calm start, with no streaks and nothing to catch up on. Just add your first word.
Hand-drawn app icons, designed by Joanna, like every colour and shape in Parola.
Parola Ultra, powered by RevenueCat: monthly, yearly with a 7-day trial, or lifetime. Everything you collect stays free.

About Parola

Words often catch our attention: a beautiful word in a novel, an unfamiliar expression in conversation, or a phrase discovered while traveling. We look them up, understand them, and then forget them.

We built Parola to give those words a home.

Unlike traditional vocabulary and flashcard apps, Parola does not turn language into homework. There are no streaks, leagues, or guilt-inducing reminders. Instead, it is a calm personal library where people can collect meaningful words, understand them, and return to them over time.

Inspiration

The idea came from noticing that dictionaries are excellent for looking words up, but not for keeping them. Notes apps can store them, but lose their linguistic richness and personal history. Learning apps focus on memorization, often at the cost of curiosity.

We wanted Parola to feel more like opening a beautifully printed book or a cabinet of linguistic curiosities. Over time, a person's collection should become a portrait of what they have read, where they have traveled, and the moments when language made them pause.

It's also personal. Witek is Kashubian, part of a minority in northern Poland with its own regional language. His father teaches it, and after many years away he is finding his way back to it himself. That's why Parola gives every language the same care: English and Japanese, but also regional, endangered and extinct languages like Latin and Old English. We want people to be able to reconnect with the language of their grandparents, or discover the one spoken where they live.

What it does

Find any word in hundreds of languages, shown in its own script.
Give it a meaning by picking the sense that caught you.
Keep it in your word book, and gather words into your own collections.

Dictionary lookup in every language is free, forever. Parola Ultra (monthly, yearly with a 7-day trial, or lifetime) unlocks unlimited collections and more, powered by RevenueCat. Parola celebrates words; it never grades you on them.

How we built it

Witek codes Parola and Joanna designs it. Every color, shape and stamp is hers.

SwiftUI, Swift 6 with strict concurrency, in a plain Model-View architecture (no ViewModels), iOS 26+.
SwiftData + CloudKit for the word book and collections, synced across your devices.
The dictionary is built from open data (Wiktionary, via kaikki.org) by a separate pipeline into gzipped, per-word shards on Cloudflare R2. Lookups go online-first; a small optional on-device index (GRDB/SQLite) speeds things up without ever gating features.
RevenueCat for Ultra subscriptions and the lifetime unlock, with a soft paywall that never interrupts onboarding.

Challenges

Hundreds of languages on a phone. A full multilingual dictionary is far too big to ship, so it's split into per-word shards served from the edge. Getting inflected forms and alternate scripts (e.g. Japanese kana forms pointing at kanji entries) to resolve to the right headword took several passes.
We went all in on custom design. Strong colors, a hand-drawn suite of custom SF Symbols used everywhere in the app, and a few fully custom shapes that carry the core of the UI. Every piece had to feel handmade and still behave like proper iOS: Dynamic Type, dark mode, accessibility, and the small details people expect from system controls.

What we learned

Restraint is a feature: removing streaks and scores made the app calmer, and more personal.
Shipping a first app is as much paperwork (agreements, tax, EU trader status, privacy labels) as code, so start early.
Open linguistic data is a gift. The long tail of small languages is where Parola feels most alive.

What's next

A gentle way to revisit the words you've collected, and expert-written collections, including ones by speakers of small and regional languages, so the people who keep these languages alive are paid for it.