ABC George: Read Real English Books
Read whole English books from Project Gutenberg, with an offline dictionary and a word book that fills itself. Free, with no account.
What is ABC George?
ABC George is a reader for people who learn English by reading a lot of it. The first version came out in 2019 and taught English by having you type out short fairy tales. The tap-a-word vocabulary engine people liked is still here. The reading side has been rebuilt from scratch around whole books.
The Project Gutenberg catalogue of more than 61,000 English books ships inside the app, so searching takes no connection. Download a book and it lives on your device. From then on the text, the dictionary, your word book and the quizzes all work offline.
Long-press a word and tap Look up. The meaning appears over the page, and the word is saved with the sentence you met it in. A few days later it comes back in a quiz, just before you would have forgotten it.
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What's Inside
Whole Books, Not Excerpts
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein and tens of thousands more, complete and in the public domain in the United States.
- Start here: thirty short, plainly written classics picked for learners
- Most downloaded: what Gutenberg's own readers read most
- Shelves for children's books, fairy tales, short stories, adventure, detective fiction and more
- Chapters are detected on download, and long ones are split into reading-sized sections
Three Ways to Read
Pages that turn like a Kindle, one continuous scroll, or a chat view where the chapter arrives one sentence at a time. Your place is shared across all three, so you can switch mid-chapter and carry on from the same sentence.
- Type size, line spacing, margins, typeface, and four page colors
- The page after a chapter's last one is the first page of the next
A Dictionary That Is Already There
WordNet 3.1 is bundled, so a lookup is instant and needs no signal.
- Senses grouped by part of speech, with a plain-English learner definition for common words
- Inflections resolve on their own: ran finds run, cities finds city
- The full Cambridge entry and Google Translate open in an in-app sheet, with ads and trackers blocked, so you never lose your place
- Any word or passage can be read aloud, at a speed you choose
A Word Book That Fills Itself
Every word you look up is saved with its definition and the sentence you met it in. The page itself stays clean, with no marks on words you have already saved. The NGSL and NAWL learner word lists are included too.
Quizzes From Your Own Reading
Questions are built from the words you actually looked up, and a five-box Leitner schedule brings the ones you miss back sooner.
- Fill in the blank, using the real sentence from the book
- Word to meaning, and meaning to word
- Spelling
Free, Offline, No Account
ABC George is free. There are no ads, no in-app purchases, and no account to create. The interface is in English on purpose: for a learner, the buttons are part of the reading too.
Start with a Short Book
Pick one from the Start here shelf, download it, and read the first page. Most of them take an evening or two.
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Book text from Project Gutenberg. Dictionary data from WordNet 3.1 (Princeton University). NGSL and NAWL word lists by Browne, Culligan and Phillips (CC BY-SA 4.0).