How Verba Checks Its Galician and Spanish

A dictionary is only useful if you can trust it. If you look up a word in Verba and use it in a CELGA exam, an email to the concello, or a conversation at the market, it should be right. This post explains how Verba is checked, and what happens when something slips through.

Two authorities

Verba follows the official standard of each language:

• Galician follows the Real Academia Galega (RAG): its dictionary, its spelling and grammar rules, and its verb conjugator. It’s the standard schools teach, the administration writes in, and the CELGA exams test.
• Spanish follows the Real Academia Española (RAE) and its dictionary of doubtful cases, the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas.

Galician also has a second written tradition, reintegrationism, which spells the language closer to Portuguese. Verba doesn’t use it. That isn’t a judgment on it, only a choice to match what learners are taught and tested on.

Verbs: every form, checked two ways

Verba conjugates 445 verbs in eight tenses in both languages. A wrong form in a table is the worst kind of mistake, because you trust a table and copy it, so verbs get the closest checking:

• Regular verbs are conjugated by rule, and every form is compared against Apertium, a free, open-source set of Galician and Spanish word lists made by linguists. Every form where the two disagree is looked up and settled one by one.
• Irregular verbs are written out in full. The Galician tables are checked form by form by hand, with the RAG’s conjugator settling any doubt. The Spanish tables come from the same open-source lists, with spot checks against the RAE.

Words and examples: read, then looked up

Every dictionary entry, example sentence, grammar guide and reference list gets read in full. Anything that looks off is looked up in the RAG dictionary or the RAE before it changes. Galician forms are never changed on a hunch: if the RAG says a form is correct, it stays, however odd it looks to a Spanish speaker.

What the latest review found

In October 2026 everything in the app got a full review: 40 guides, three reference lists, more than 2,200 dictionary entries and every hand-written verb table. Out of all that, about 35 things were wrong. Some examples:

• Champaña was marked feminine. The RAG has it as masculine: o champaña.
• The Galician for a postal address was given as dirección. In Galician that word means direction or management. An address is o enderezo.
• An example used sillón, which the RAG doesn’t accept. The Galician word is a poltrona.
• A guide called coñezo an irregular form. It isn’t: c becomes z before o just to keep the sound the same, the way it does in any regular verb.
• An example said Sempre quéixase. Words like sempre pull the pronoun in front of the verb: Sempre se queixa.

All of these are fixed in Verba 1.3.

When Verba doesn’t have a word

No dictionary has everything. When a search comes up empty, Verba offers links straight to the RAG dictionary, the RAE dictionary and Wiktionary, so you can check a word at the source. The RAG also launched its own Spanish-Galician dictionary in September 2026, free to use on its website.

When you find a mistake

If something in Verba looks wrong to you, tell me. In the app, go to Settings → Make Correction. It takes a minute, and the report comes straight to me.

Get Verba on the App Store. It’s free and works offline.