Selcouth

A quiet word game for readers: a passage from Austen or Melville, a few words missing, you put back the words they chose. Thirty classics free. No ads, no subscription.

selcouth (adj.) — strange, unusual, rare; unfamiliar; wondrous.

I made Selcouth to spend more time with the authors I love. You get a passage from Dickens, Dostoevsky, or Cather, a few words missing, and you put them back. Try one, from Pride and Prejudice:

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of ______. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."

honesty? virtue? humility?

Austen wrote humility. That's the game. Just you and the passage, weighing the words the way the author did.

There's a commonplace book for the words and passages you want to keep; any kept word can be revisited in context, across every book in your library. There are quiet game mechanics too (ranks, rare words to hunt), but the passage is the point, not the score.

Thirty classics are free (more than 9,000 passages), with collections when you want more: Gothic & Weird, The Russians, The Sea, Story-Books, The English Novel, and more planned. Each collection is a one-time purchase, yours forever, never a subscription; the full library today is 187 books and more than 55,000 passages. If you'd rather spend ten minutes with Middlemarch than a feed, this is for you.

— Zach

P.S. No account, no ads, no tracking, works offline. iPhone and iPad, your commonplace synced through iCloud.