Chrome extension · version 1.2.0
Syllastack Hover
Read English as you always do. Hover over a word and a small card shows how it is built: onset, nucleus, coda, and where the stress falls. The page itself is never changed.
The word vocabulary shown as five stacked syllables.
Try it
Hover over the dotted words. On a phone, tap them.
Spelling lies, but sound does not: though, through, tough, cough, thought. Pronunciation, linguistics, necessary, comfortable, rhythm.
What it does
Hover to see the sound
Works on any web page. The original text stays exactly as written, and the card appears only while you point at a word.
Click to look it up in your language
Clicking the card opens a Google search for the word's meaning and nuance. Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German, French and Russian are built in. You can edit the query or add any other language.
PDFs, including scans
A built-in PDF viewer turns the embedded text into hoverable text. For scanned pages without a text layer, English OCR runs on your device when a page nears the screen.
Connected-speech rules
Palatalization, assimilation, coronal stop deletion, G-dropping, glide insertion, homograph choice, and stress on one-syllable content words. Each rule has its own switch.
Textbook symbols
One setting relabels the notation to the symbols many textbooks use (y becomes j, eɪ becomes e, oʊ becomes o). The sounds do not change.
Offline and private
The 141,000-word pronunciation database ships inside the extension. Nothing you read is sent to us. Privacy policy
Good to know
- Permissions. The extension asks for access to all sites because it has to read the words on the pages you open. It also uses
storagefor your settings andactiveTabfor the popup. - PDF viewer. In Chrome 151 and later, PDFs can open automatically in the Syllastack viewer, and you can turn that off in the popup. In older versions, use Open current PDF or Choose PDF in the popup.
- Size. The download is about 10 MB, mostly the pronunciation data and the OCR engine.
- Built with. Mozilla PDF.js for PDF text and Tesseract.js for OCR, both bundled locally under their own licenses.