Read English
like you can hear it.
A tiny browser extension that puts the phonetic alphabet above any English word you hover. Color-coded vowels, stress marks, translation in 100+ languages — on every page you read.
The Quiet Discipline of Listening Carefully
By Iris Hendren · September 14, 2025
Making little or no noise; the absence of audible disturbance.
Pronunciation, finally
made visible.
English spelling hides how words sound. Lumen makes the phonetics visible — color, marks, and tooltips that work on every page you read.
Seven sounds.
Seven colors.
Each vowel phoneme gets a unique color. Your eye starts reading sound, not just spelling — across every page.
Stress, glides &
hidden sounds.
Six toggleable markers for stress patterns, diphthongs, TH/DH sounds, long vowels, Z-underlines, and hidden phonemes. Pro only.
Hover a word.
Know it fully.
Popover shows IPA transcription, English definition, and translation in any of 100+ languages.
A senior military officer ranked above a lieutenant colonel.
Select any text.
Translate it.
Highlight any sentence or paragraph — a Translate button appears instantly. 100+ languages via Google Translate.
The colonel commanded the regiment with quiet precision.
Kolonel itu memimpin resimen dengan presisi yang tenang.
Any video with CC,
color-coded.
Lumen annotates captions on YouTube, Vimeo, and any platform with closed captions. Pause-on-hover freezes the video when you inspect a word.
Enable per-site.
No distractions.
Toggle Lumen on or off for any domain from the popup. Use it when you want to learn — hide it when you don't.
Install once.
It just shows up,
everywhere you read.
Add the extension
One click in your browser's store. Lumen Pronunciation weighs less than a podcast ad — no account needed to start.
Open any English page
An article, a Reddit thread, a Google Doc, your inbox. Hover any word — IPA blooms above it in tiny moss-green italics.
Hover for the full picture
Hover any word for IPA, definition, and a translation in your language. Highlight a sentence to translate the whole thing instantly.
Every vowel
gets its own color.
English spelling hides the sound. Lumen paints it back — one color per vowel phoneme, so patterns you never noticed start jumping out.
One click.
Be reading better in 30s.
Built for Chrome and any Chromium-based browser. No account needed — install and it starts working immediately.
Safari support · coming later · join the waitlist
From "I think I'm saying it right"
to knowing you are.
“I've read English fluently for a decade and still mispronounced 'epitome' for years. Lumen caught it on day one — now every article is a little phonetics lesson.”
“The color-coding clicked after two days. Now /θ/ looks different from every other 'th' — my brain just picks it up.”
“It's the only extension I've kept past a month. Quiet, fast, no nags.”
Free for as long as
you want it. Pro, if you go deep.
Color coding, translation, and video captions — free forever. Pro adds the full phoneme marker system for serious learners.
Reader
No account, no nags. Everything here is free forever — no daily caps.
- ✓IPA on every word, every page
- ✓Color-coded vowels — 7 sounds, 7 colors
- ✓Ghost letters & silent letter markers
- ✓Translation tooltip — IPA + definition + 100+ languages
- ✓Select-to-translate any sentence or paragraph
- ✓Video captions — YouTube & all platforms with CC
- ✓Per-site on/off control
- ⊕Stress accents & diphthong markers
- ⊕TH /θ/ & DH /ð/ sound marks
- ⊕Long vowel & Z-underline markers
- ⊕Settings sync across devices
Lumen Pro
For serious learners. Adds the full phoneme marker system on top of everything in Reader.
- ✓Everything in Reader
- ✓Stress accents — updáte, compóse…
- ✓Diphthong markers — iⁱtem, bóⁱl…
- ✓TH /θ/ & DH /ð/ marks — thᵗin, thᵈis
- ✓Long vowel markers — soo:n, fée:d
- ✓Z-sound underline & hidden phonemes
- ✓Sync settings across devices
- ✓Early access to new features
Questions, answered.
No page contents leave your device. The extension processes text locally in your browser — nothing is sent to any server. The translation tooltip calls the translation API only for words you hover, and only the word itself is sent, not the surrounding page.
The next word you read could be
the one you finally say right.
Free on every major browser. Two clicks to install. Quiet by default.