Glossary

MemDecks terms, A to Z by concept

Account

A MemDecks sign-in tied to an email address or a Google login. An account is not a paid plan and not a feature unlock: it exists so a collection outlives the browser it was made in. See pricing.

Card

One saved word in one learner's collection: an English word, its translation into the study language, an image, audio when available, transliteration for non-Latin scripts, and a progress pair (score and card HP). A card belongs to one learner and one study language.

Card HP

The amount of practice a specific card needs before MemDecks treats it as learned. Card HP is set from the word's difficulty tier when the card is created, is between 100 and 500, and never changes afterwards. Progress on a card is score ÷ card HP.

Score

Practice credit accumulated on one card. Games report a score change when a learner answers; MemDecks adds it, clamps the result between 0 and the card's card HP, and stores it. Score is the numerator of a card's progress.

Collection

Every card a learner has saved in the currently selected study language. The Collection tab shows it; games are built from it. Switching study language switches which collection is shown.

Study language

The language a learner is currently learning. MemDecks stores one selected study language at a time and it decides which collection, which topic packs, and which games are shown. English is not a study language in MemDecks; it is the pivot.

Pivot language

English. Every MemDecks word pair runs through English: a card is always English on one side and the study language on the other. There is no direct Greek-to-Japanese pair.

Topic pack

A curated, MemDecks-maintained list of English words on one theme — food, travel, work — split into difficulty tiers. Subscribing to a topic pack feeds its words into the pump. A topic pack is not a deck: it is a source of new words, not a set of cards you own.

Tier

A difficulty band inside a topic pack. Most packs have five tiers; the starter pack has four. A learner works through one tier at a time, and MemDecks unlocks the next tier when average progress across the current tier's cards reaches 70%.

Pump

The mechanism that feeds new words into the Translator one at a time. Pressing Next word takes the next entry from the queue MemDecks built out of the learner's subscribed topic packs. The pump introduces words the learner has never seen; it does not schedule review of words already saved.

Queue

The ordered list of not-yet-seen words the pump serves from. MemDecks rebuilds it from the learner's topic-pack subscriptions, drops anything already saved or dismissed, sorts by difficulty tier, and interleaves packs round-robin so several subscriptions advance together.

Lemma

The dictionary form of an English word as it appears in the MemDecks catalogue — "run", not "running". Topic packs, the pump queue, and word identity are all keyed on lemmas.

Deck

A named set of cards. Three kinds exist: ready-made decks published by MemDecks, decks a learner builds themselves, and decks imported from an Anki package. Importing a deck copies its words into the collection as cards.

Phrase Builder

A lesson-style MemDecks game. One lesson introduces five words, plays them inside a single spoken phrase, and then mixes challenges that rebuild the whole phrase. Finishing a lesson saves its five words to the collection as cards.

Lesson

One authored Phrase Builder unit: five words, one anchor phrase, and its audio, published per study language. Lessons are versioned; a language only shows the lessons that have been published for it.

Game

A standalone practice app that MemDecks opens in a frame and hands the learner's cards to. Each game declares how many cards it needs and, when relevant, which study languages it supports. Games report score changes back to MemDecks.

Match

One run of a multiplayer game with a fixed set of players, formed either by quick match or in a private room. When a match ends the group stays together so it can ready up for another round.

Lobby

The matchmaking service behind multiplayer games. It authenticates players, runs quick match and private rooms, and hands a formed match to the game. It runs as its own process, separate from the MemDecks app server.

Guest session

An anonymous MemDecks account created automatically so a first-time visitor can save cards before deciding to register. A guest session lives in one browser. Signing up later merges everything it holds into the new account.

Transliteration

The Latin-letter rendering of a word written in another script — barev for բարև. MemDecks shows transliteration on cards in study languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, and never for Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian, or Turkish, which already do.

Enrichment

The extra lexical detail attached to a word beyond its translation: part of speech, gender, alternative senses, example sentences, synonyms and their register. Enrichment is produced separately from the translation and can be missing on a card without the card being broken.

TTS

Text-to-speech audio for a word in the study language. MemDecks generates it in the background and stores the file, so playback is a stored recording rather than a live synthesis call. Audio can be absent on a newly created card and appear later.

Word source

Any of the four ways a card enters a collection: a Phrase Builder lesson, the Translator (a word typed in, or the next word from the pump), a ready-made deck, or an Anki import. See where words come from.

Terms MemDecks deliberately does not use

Some vocabulary-app vocabulary does not apply to MemDecks, and using it would describe a product that does not exist.