See the world in its own words.
A browser extension that turns every foreign-language page into an explorable text. Select any word to see its meaning, reading, examples, and the characters it's built from — so you don't just translate the web, you learn to read it.
The idea
You're reading something in a language you're learning, and you hit a word you don't know. The usual move — copy it, switch tabs, paste it into a translator — breaks your flow and hands you an answer while teaching you nothing about how the word actually works.
Worldglass keeps you in place. Hold any word up to the glass and see its reading, its meaning, real examples, and — for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — the family of words built from the same character. No tab-switching, no account, nothing sent anywhere.
Try it — right here
Select any word, or tap the underlined ones ↓我每天用电脑学习中文。
私は毎日日本語を勉強します。
저는 매일 한국어를 공부합니다.
أنا أتعلم اللغة العربية.
Je lis le monde dans sa langue.
Leo el mundo en su idioma.
Highlight any word above, or tap the underlined ones. Even better — install Worldglass in Chrome and this whole page comes alive: highlight text anywhere and the real popup appears. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean also show how a word is built; the alphabetic languages show reading and meaning.
Who it's for
And wants to understand more of it, faster — without leaving the page.
Read authentic material above your level, look words up in context, and watch how characters recombine into new words.
Follow foreign-language writers, forums, and comment threads without a translator tab open beside you.
Decode menus, signs, forms, and messages — including text baked into images, through built-in OCR.
Furigana for Japanese, tone-sandhi pinyin for Chinese, Revised Romanization for Korean — with hanja roots surfaced where they matter.
Skim primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, or Malay and pull meaning without a full translation pass.
Select a paragraph that mixes several languages and each run is detected and annotated in its own — not just the first one.
What's in the glass
Worldglass reads the script and sends your selection to the right dictionary — across ten languages, automatically.
Pinyin, furigana, romanization, and vowelization — rendered inline and adaptively, dialed up while you learn and down as you improve.
Concise glosses plus real example sentences, so you see the word doing its job — not just its dictionary entry.
Tap a character to explore the common words built from it — 学 → 学校 · 大学 · 学习 — and wander the whole neighborhood.
Definitions contain words too. Click a character inside a gloss, or a related word in a family, and Worldglass looks that one up — and the next — as deep as you need.
Tap to hear a word or line read aloud with your device's built-in voices — a quick check on a reading.
Reading images
Selection only reaches text the page will hand over. But a great deal of language never becomes selectable text at all — it's baked into pictures: manga panels and webtoons, screenshots, a photo of a menu or a street sign, hard-coded subtitles, a scanned page, a meme.
This one starts from the toolbar. Click the Worldglass button in your browser's toolbar to switch on OCR mode, then drag a box over the text inside any image. Worldglass recognizes the characters on your device — the picture is never uploaded — and hands the result back as ordinary explorable text: the same readings, meanings, and word families, now on words a translator would have skipped entirely.
Open OCR mode from the Worldglass icon in your browser's toolbar. Don't see it? Pin it from the extensions (puzzle-piece) menu.
Draw a rectangle over the text inside any image on the page.
It's recognized on your device, then becomes selectable and annotated — just like text you'd highlight anywhere else.
The ten
Chinese ships with Cantonese, Hokkien, and Teochew readings alongside Mandarin.
Ten today — and more on request. If the language you read isn't here yet, ask.
The philosophy
Most technology treats foreignness as a problem to erase. It sees an unfamiliar script and rushes to convert it into something familiar. Worldglass takes the opposite view: foreignness shouldn't be erased — it should be made navigable.
Auto-translation makes the web convenient, but it can make us less attentive. It lets us consume a page without ever touching the language. Worldglass lets you consume and learn in the same motion. The original matters. The script matters. The characters matter. The structure matters. Meaning is not only the final English paraphrase — it is also the path by which a word becomes meaningful.
Consider the two ways this usually breaks down. Open a Chinese dictionary and the definition is itself in Chinese — to learn one word you must already know three more, and if you don't recognize those characters the frustration only compounds. Reach for auto-translation instead and the original simply disappears, swapped for an English sentence that leaves nothing behind to learn from. Worldglass refuses both dead ends: it keeps the original in front of you and makes the defining words explorable too — click a character inside a gloss to look it up in turn, following the meaning inward rather than hitting a wall or watching it vanish.
Translation gives you the answer.
Worldglass shows you how the answer is built.
Decomposition is powerful, but it can lie. Not every compound is a tidy sum of its parts — words drift, borrow, and turn metaphorical over centuries. So Worldglass keeps a word's components and its real meaning in separate columns, and never lets one masquerade as the other.
It will tell you 电脑 is literally 电 electric + 脑 brain, and that in modern usage it means computer — without pretending the pieces always add up. Where a word's meaning is idiomatic or historically shifted, it says so. A glass should clarify, not flatter.
Private by design
The dictionaries are bundled with the extension, so lookups never touch a server. There's no account, no analytics, and no tracking — the text you read stays on your computer. Optional translation uses your browser's own built-in, on-device translator; if you ever choose to enable a cloud engine, it's opt-in and clearly disclosed.