There is one search box and one instruction: type what you've got. That is the entire manual.
But "what you've got" is rarely a clean, correctly spelled dictionary headword. It is a half-remembered word, a description, a lyric, a thing your kid said. So here is the long version of the manual: everything the box takes, with examples you can try as you read.
Type it wrong, land right
Start with the boring case. You know the word, you just can't spell it. Type buisness, tounge or wierd and you land on business, tongue and weird. There is no error page in between. The wrong spelling goes in, the right entry comes out.
Grammar forms keep their shape. Look up sprinting and you get an entry for sprinting, not a redirect to sprint. If a form is worth typing, it is worth its own page.
Casing gets the same treatment. WEIRD in caps still lands on lowercase weird, because that is what English wants. But casing that carries meaning survives. iPhone keeps its small i, NASA keeps its caps, and era and ERA are two different pages, a stretch of history and an abbreviation.
What it's called when...
Now the useful part. The word can be missing entirely. Describe what you mean in plain language and the search resolves the description to the term that names it:
- what it's called when you throw someone out of a window → defenestration
- the day after tomorrow, in one word → overmorrow
- rain falling while the sun is still out → sunshower
- the plastic tip of a shoelace → aglet
- misheard song lyrics you keep singing anyway → mondegreen
- the fear of being without your phone → nomophobia
Everyday words come back the same way. Ask for walking slowly with heavy tired steps and you get trudge. The rule of thumb: if you can say it to a friend, you can type it into the box.
Name a language, get that language
Add "in <language>" to anything and the answer comes back as that language's word:
- love in latvian → mīlestība
- butterfly in portuguese → borboleta
- snow in finnish → lumi
- moon in ukrainian → місяць
You can stack this on a description. Ask for the day after tomorrow in german and you get übermorgen, a real word Germans use every day.
A few quiet rules sit underneath. A word already in the language you named stays put, paldies in latvian is just paldies. Spelling is fixed inside that language, so milestiba typed flat comes back wearing its diacritics. And you often don't need to name a language at all. Type saudade cold and it lands in Portuguese on its own.
Words the dictionaries haven't met yet
Every first-time lookup runs a live web search before a single line of the entry is written. That one design choice means the box is never stuck at a print deadline. Slang born last month, brand names, meme words, even digits used as words. If people out there use it as a word, it is a word here.
Type 404 and you get the slang sense, someone checked out, nothing behind the eyes, not just the error code. Type doomscrolling and you get a full entry with examples, a word no print dictionary carried a few years ago. For the tricky ones the search runs a second, sharper query in the word's own language to pin the sense down.
Whole phrases, not their pieces
Phrases get their own entries, and the search never chops one down to a single word. Spill the beans resolves to the idiom, not to beans. Cold feet is about doubt, not socks.
It goes past fixed idioms too. An ordinary line you heard in a show gets kept whole and treated as the expression it is.
Yes, even Klingon
When we said name a language, we meant any language. Success in klingon comes back as Qapla'. A greeting in klingon gets you nuqneH. Dothraki khaleesi has a page. High Valyrian and Na'vi work too. Languages that never got an official ISO code still get their own shelf.
What happens after you hit Enter
Watch the small print while an entry builds and you can see the pipeline work. Searching is the live web search. Thinking is the step that decides what you actually meant: the typo fix, the language, the sense. Then a bare entry appears in a couple of seconds, definition and meanings first, and the details keep filling in while you read. The pages the search consulted end up at the bottom of the entry as further reading.
Two more things happen quietly. If you read Linguin in another language, the entry arrives in yours, not in English. And the exact thing you typed is remembered on the entry, so the same sloppy query lands instantly next time, for you and for everyone after you.
Not every lookup is built on the spot. Most entries already exist because someone asked before you. The popular ones have been through human hands. Editors review and polish them, contributors add meanings. The live build is for the long tail. If you are the first person ever to ask for something, the page did not exist a moment ago. You watched it being made, and now it is there for everyone.
When you invent one by accident
Sometimes the input genuinely is not a word. A typo too far gone, two words mashed into one. You still don't hit a wall. The search hands back the nearest real words and lets you pick the one you meant. And because a dead end should at least be fun, it also writes your non-word a perfectly deadpan fake definition.
Try to stump it
That is the whole manual, honestly. One box, no syntax to learn, no language switcher to find. Describe, misspell, mix languages, quote a show, go full Klingon.
Open Linguin and type the strangest thing you've got.