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< INDEXP309

QuickWord — Offline Dictionary in a Notification

Select a word in any Android app and its definition arrives as a notification. 1.4M words, fully offline, no app switch.

ROLE
Solo — design and engineering
PERIOD
2026 – Present
WORDS, FULLY OFFLINE
1.4M
STACK
Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, SQLite, Python (ETL), Gradle
Source on GitHub
THE PROBLEM

Looking up a word on a phone costs you the thing you were reading. You leave the app, wait on a browser, land on a page carrying ads and a cookie banner, and by the time you have the definition you have lost the sentence. The one app that solved this properly, NotificationDictionary, had not been rebuilt for modern Android and shipped a dictionary from a much older Wiktionary dump.

WHAT I BUILT
  • Put the answer where the question is: the lookup renders as a heads-up notification with Thesaurus, Open and Save actions, so you never leave the app you were reading. The Thesaurus action swaps the same notification to synonyms in place rather than opening anything.
  • Made offline the default rather than the fallback. 1.4M words come from a kaikki.org wiktextract of the English Wiktionary, built into a local database by a Python ETL and shipped as a release the app fetches once; a small starter dictionary is bundled so it works before that finishes.
  • Added a Wikipedia path, with attribution, for the words a dictionary does not carry: names, places, people. An optional 38MB offline pack of the 50,000 most-read article leads lets that path run with no network too.
  • Built the app around reading: serif-typeset word pages, IPA with text-to-speech, prefix search, recents and favourites.
  • Kept the licensing honest. The data is CC BY-SA and attributed in-app; libzim, which is GPL, is a build-time tool only, so nothing GPL ships in the APK.
OUTCOME
  • A definition in about five seconds without leaving the page you were on, working in aeroplane mode.
  • 1.4M words offline, against the few tens of thousands a bundled dictionary usually carries.
  • No ads, no tracking, no accounts, MIT licensed, and released on F-Droid terms. The data licences are honoured rather than worked around.
SCREENSHOTS
An Android notification shade showing a QuickWord notification: the headword 'petrichor' with its part of speech 'noun', the start of the definition 'The pleasant, earthy smell that accompan...', and a row of three actions reading Thesaurus, Open and Save.
The whole interaction: select a word and the definition is already in the shade. No app switch, no network.
The same QuickWord notification after tapping Thesaurus: the heading now reads 'quick - synonyms' and lists astute, fast, rapid, sharp, speedy and swift, with Open and Share actions beneath.
Thesaurus swaps the same notification to synonyms in place. Still nothing opened, still nothing fetched.
The QuickWord word page for 'dog' in dark mode. A large serif headword sits above the IPA pronunciation and a Listen button, then numbered noun and verb senses, each with an italic example sentence, and green synonym chips beneath each part of speech.
Open it and you get a typeset word page with senses, examples, IPA with text-to-speech, and synonyms as chips.