Nivora Roots

Most English words carry a small foreign biography. Salary is a Roman soldier's salt
allowance. Quarantine is the forty days a Venetian harbour kept a plague-ship at anchor.
Robot is Czech for a serf's drudge labour. Nivora Roots is a quiet, offline reference
that hands you sixty of those small biographies, one at a time, with no urgency to it.
How the app is laid out
The left rail has four destinations. They are meant to be opened in any order and used
for different moods.
Today — one word, one root, one short paragraph explaining how the meaning travelled
from there to here. Previous and Next walk you forward and back through the deck; Save
keeps any word you would like to return to. The page remembers where you left off.
Atlas — a list of the source languages, from Latin and Greek down to Nahuatl, Hokkien,
Old Norse and Algonquian. Each entry tells you how many words in the deck descend from
that language, and which ones, so you can see at a glance how much of your daily English
is, say, Arabic borrowings or seaborne loans from Min Chinese.
Browse — every word in the deck, A to Z, each line with its source language, the root
form, and a one-line gloss. A small Saved filter narrows the list to your bookmarks.
This is the page to use when a word pops into your head and you want to look it up.
Quiz — a ten-question round that gives you the modern word and a short clue and asks
which language the root comes from. Your best score is kept on the device.
The why
The point of an etymology is rarely the trivia. It is that a word is a small fossil of
the people who used it: the soldier paid in salt, the doctor stitching together Greek
roots in 1688 to name homesickness, the Hokkien sailor with a jar of fermented fish
sauce that English would, three centuries later, pour over chips. Nivora Roots tries to
make that visible without turning it into a quiz show.
What's inside
— Sixty curated words, each with the source language, the original root, the literal
meaning, and a short explanatory paragraph.
— A language atlas across twenty-seven source languages.
— A bookmarks set you can return to from Today or Browse.
— A ten-question root-matching quiz with your personal best.
Offline by design
Nivora Roots holds the VIBRATE permission and nothing else. There is no internet
permission anywhere in the manifest, so the app cannot reach a server even if it tried.
Your bookmarks, your quiz best and your place in the deck stay on the phone. Open it in
flight mode and it behaves exactly the same as it does on wifi.