About

More words will not fix this. Going around them will.

The problem this is for

You are in a meeting, or reading an email, and a phrase goes past that you cannot pin down — circle back, bandwidth, let's take this offline. Every word in it is one you know. Together they mean something else, and by the time you have worked it out the conversation has moved on.

The usual advice is to learn more words. That is slow, and it is not what fluent speakers do under pressure. They go around the word: they say the same thing with the words they already have.

What is here

• The translator. Paste an email, a message or a meeting invite and read it again in plain words, with every swap shown side by side.
• The jargon list. Over 210 phrases people actually use at work, each with what it really means and what to say instead.
• The test. Measure which of your own words fall outside the common thousand — those are the ones costing you time.
• The lessons. Five ways around a word you do not know, in three minutes, then the same five moves in the places where people get stuck.

Where the word lists come from

Word ranks come from the New General Service List 1.2 (Browne, Culligan & Phillips), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The speech figures come from 40 public campaign speech transcripts, 144,337 words in all; lines are quoted as language samples, chosen for their words and not for their politics.

What it costs, and what it keeps

It is free, and there is no account. Nothing you type leaves the page: the rewriting happens in your own browser, and we have no copy of what you paste. What we do count is listed on the privacy page, in full.

Who made it

One person working on their own English at work, who got tired of nodding along at phrases that turned out to mean something simple. If something here is wrong or unclear, the contact page is the way to say so.