Verba ships with a large offline dictionary, but no dictionary covers every word two people need. When you search for something Verba doesn’t know, you can add it, and it’s yours from then on: searchable, reviewable, and available completely offline. There are more ways to do this than the search box, and the add-word form holds more than just a translation.
Add a word from search
Search for the word you want to add.
If it’s not in the dictionary, you’ll see an Add “your word” option below the results.
Tap it to open the Add Word sheet, pre-filled with what you typed.
Fill in the part of speech and at least one translation, Spanish or Galician.
Tap Save.
Search isn’t the only way in. The Dictionary tab has a + button in the toolbar, and the Library tab has its own add trigger, both of which open the same blank form. Use whichever you happen to be looking at.
Everything the form can hold
The word and its translation are the only required fields. Everything else is there for when you want it:
English and, optionally, Also: other English words that mean the same thing (like “sofa” for “couch”). Anything in Also gets matched by search too.
Part of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, phrase, pronoun, numeral, determiner, preposition, conjunction, or particle.
Galician and Spanish: at least one of the two is required alongside English.
Gender, for nouns with a single fixed gender, like agua (feminine). This is a simple masculine/feminine/either picker, separate from feminine forms below.
Feminine forms, for words that come in a real masculine/feminine pair, like Spanish perro/perra or Galician can/cadela. If a word only ever has one form, use Gender instead.
Plural, only if the regular plural rule would be wrong or misleading for this word. Leave it blank otherwise.
Usage notes, shown under the translation, the kind of aside a dictionary adds in parentheses, like “also coche.”
Pronunciation, in IPA, for Spanish and Galician. If both languages sound the same, one field covers both.
Meanings, a whole sub-screen: add a definition plus an English, Galician, and Spanish example sentence for each sense of the word. A word can have as many meanings as it needs, each with its own examples.
If you try to save a word that already exists in your dictionary under the same part of speech, Verba stops and asks whether you meant to add it anyway rather than silently creating a duplicate. Spelling alone isn’t enough: drink the noun and drink the verb are separate entries, and the dictionary itself holds eighteen such pairs.
Add a word without opening the dictionary
Verba exposes an Add Word action to Shortcuts, so you can add a word without navigating to the app at all:
Build a Shortcut that prompts for English, Spanish, and Galician, then runs Add Word.
Trigger it from Siri, or assign it to the Action Button for a single physical press.
The action also takes a part of speech and feminine forms if you want them, though it’s a narrower set of fields than the full form: no Also, gender, plural, pronunciation, or meanings. Add those later from the word’s Edit menu if you want them.
One thing worth knowing: the Shortcuts action doesn’t check for duplicates the way the in-app form does. Running it twice on the same word adds it twice.
Add Word from Control Center
Verba’s Control Center button opens the app with the Add Word sheet already up, no searching first. Add it once from Control Center’s own editor (Settings app → Control Center → Add a Control) and it’s one tap away from your lock screen or Control Center from then on.
Add a word from any other app
Select a word in Safari, Books, or basically anywhere text can be selected, then share it to Verba through the system share sheet. If Verba already has the word, you’ll see its entry. If it doesn’t, you’ll get an Add “your word” to Verba button that opens the same add-word sheet, pre-filled, without leaving the app you were in.
A tip for building your own list
Add words as you meet them, not in a batch later. The moment right after you learn a word, from context, from a conversation, from something you read, is when it’s easiest to also capture the translation you actually want, rather than the first entry a dictionary offers.
