Gloss · How Gloss writes its explanations

How Gloss writes its explanations.

Every explanation in Gloss starts from one meaning and is written six ways, so turning the wheel changes the voice and never the sense. Here is how they are made, and checked.

One meaning, six ways

Each word starts from a single anchored sense: what it means, the words it gets confused with, and the ways people get it wrong. Every style is written from that anchor. Plain says it once, clearly; ADHD puts the point first; Gen Z says it the way a friend would; Metaphor gives you a picture; Formal is the register for an essay; Like I’m 5 uses no long words to explain the long word.

Who writes them

The explanations are written with Claude, Anthropic’s model, to a style guide we wrote: twelve rules, each with examples of what passes and what fails. Among them: plain words, a sentence you can see, nothing longer than the word it explains, and an origin only when it is true.

How they are checked

The words on the core list, the ones that make up most of what people read, are chosen by a model too, the Curator, which reads every candidate once and keeps only the words worth a reader’s minute. For each word, one draft is written. Code then checks what a machine can check: length, banned phrases, a ceiling on how hard the words may be. Where an editorial model runs, it scores each explanation and sends weak ones back with notes. A draft that fails is written again, at most twice, and left out if it still fails. No person reads the explanations before they ship.

A word that isn’t on the core list, or a paragraph you paste, is written on the spot by a faster model and checked by the same code. If it fails, you see a plain message, never a broken explanation.

The classic definition and the quotes

Every card also carries the classic dictionary definition, quoted word for word from Wiktionary and labeled as such, for when you want the formal sense. The lines in Quotes come from public-domain books, and each is checked against its source.

On this site

The words on gloss.day are written to the same style guide.

When something is off

Every card in the app has “Something off?”. No person reads the reports: the explanation is checked again, and a wrong one is written again and arrives with the next update. You can also write to support@gloss.day.