What are usage labels?

Short answer

Small coloured chips that say when you can use a word: Formal, Slang, Business and seven more. Most words carry none, a word never carries more than two, and you can filter by them.

Knowing what a word means is half of it. Knowing when you can say it is the other half, and that is what usage labels are for.

When Vokabulo builds a card it looks at the word the way a dictionary would, and if the word carries a register it marks it. The labels are small coloured chips on the card:

Informal, Colloquial, Slang, Vulgar for the relaxed end
Formal, Literary, Business, Technical for the careful end
Old-fashioned and Regional, which sit outside both and can pair with either

Most words get none, and that is the point. An ordinary word is neutral and shows no chip, so a chip always means something. A word carries at most two, and a formal label never combines with an informal one, because a word cannot be both.

The label describes the word itself, not its translation. Chapucero is colloquial in Spanish whether or not you would call something "shoddy" at work.

Where you see them

On the word card in your list, on the word card in Scenes and in Sets, and in the quiz once you have turned the card over. They are the third section of the Filter sheet, so you can study only the words you would use with a friend, or only the ones you could put in an email. Exporting to CSV includes them.

Changing one

Open the word, tap the pencil, and the Usage block appears in the row under the sentence. Tap a chip to add it, tap it again to take it off. Once two are on, or once you have picked a side, the chips that would contradict them disappear from the picker.

Still stuck?

What are usage labels?

Where you see them

Changing one

Words