About YouTongue

Q: How do I get a video removed?

Write to takedown@youtongue.app. The takedown page says what we need and what happens next.

YouTongue is an English pronunciation search engine and listening trainer. Type any English word or phrase, and it plays the moments in real YouTube videos where people say it — in the official YouTube player, cued to the line, with the captions on screen. Then it keeps the words you looked up and helps you train your ear on them.

At a glance

What it does: shows how English words and phrases sound in real speech, and turns the words you look up into practice.
Who it is for: learners of English who follow textbook audio but lose real, fast speech; teachers who want real examples of a word in context.
Accents: American, British and Australian, or all at once.
Speeds: 0.5×, 0.75×, 1×.
Where: the website, a Chrome extension and an Android app, all on one account.
Price: search is free with no account; practice is free with a Google account; Pro is $4.99 a month, $35.99 a year (7 days free) or $69 once.
Language: English only, for now.

How the search works

Type a word or a phrase — colonel, queue, to no avail. YouTongue looks for it in the captions of tens of thousands of YouTube videos and opens the clip where it is said. The caption line shows under the clip with the word highlighted. Replay it, slow it down to 0.75× or 0.5×, or go on to the next clip of the same word.

Accent filter. American, British and Australian. The accent comes from the channel a video belongs to (a parliament, a government agency, a broadcaster), not from guessing a voice — so the list is short on purpose.
Typos. Search a misspelling and the clips are for the word you meant, with a link back to what you typed.
Meaning in context. AI reads the sentence in the clip and says what the word means there — not every sense a dictionary lists. Free shows 5 new meanings a day; Pro has no limit.
Word pages. About 19,000 of the most common English words and phrases have a page of their own at their search address, like colonel: real sentences to listen to, the words it is easy to mix up with, and its neighbours in the dictionary.

Practice built on your own words

Search is where it starts. Sign in with Google, and every word you look up is kept; four kinds of practice are built from those words and from real speech.

Dictations. Hear a real moment from YouTube with the captions hidden, type the missing word, and see where your ear slipped. A new Daily dictation every morning, Endless when you want more, and the words you miss come back until they stick.
Shadowing (beta). Hear a native speaker, say the line back, and get a pronunciation score with a tip. Pro scores every sound and the stress.
Tests. A real article with your words taken out, or a word underlined in its sentence with four meanings to choose from.
Flashcards. Every word you look up becomes a card: the word on the front, its meaning in your sentence or your own note on the back.
Library. Every word you looked up, grouped by the site you read it on; folders of saved words with notes; folders other people share with you. Pro imports word lists and exports folders to CSV.

Apps

Chrome extension. Select a word on any web page, or tap a word in a video’s subtitles, and hear it in real clips with its meaning in that sentence — without leaving the page. Free on the Chrome Web Store.
Android app. Select a word in any app — a browser, a messenger, a book — and tap YouTongue: the clip and the meaning open on top. The Daily dictation and shadowing are there too, on the same account. Free on Google Play.

Free and Pro

Free: unlimited search and clips; 5 word meanings a day; unlimited folders and saved words; flashcards for all your words; the Daily dictation and Daily shadowing; Endless with 5 dictation clips and 5 shadowing lines a day; one folder a day to practise.

Pro: practice without limits on every folder, your saved words and the pages you read; every sound and the stress scored in shadowing; every word’s meaning with no daily limit; word list import and CSV export. $4.99 a month, $35.99 a year with a 7-day free trial, or $69 once for life. Refunds within 14 days. See Pricing.

Where the clips come from

YouTongue indexes the captions of public YouTube videos, not the videos themselves. A search result is only a pointer — a video and a second — and playback is the ordinary YouTube embed of the original video, so it counts as a view for its creator, with their ads and the link back to their channel.

The videos come from three kinds of channels:

Public bodies whose videos are open by law or by licence: the UK, Scottish and New Zealand parliaments, the UK government, US federal agencies and Voice of America, Australian government agencies.
Videos their creators published under a Creative Commons licence — only those whose speech scores high on a quality check (pauses, speech rate, music).
Hand-picked channels with professional sound and natural speech: talks and lectures, storytelling, theatre, debates, interviews and reporting. A channel gets in only after a sample of its videos passes the same quality check. All rights stay with the owners, and a video comes out on request.

Left out on purpose: music, games, children’s content, reactions and compilations, auto-dubbed or AI-voiced videos, and language lessons — the point is to hear how people really speak. Within the results, clearer speech comes first.

What it is not

It is not a video host. Every clip plays from YouTube, in YouTube's own player, counted as a YouTube view for the creator.
It is not a dictionary. There is no studio recording — only speech that already exists.
It is not a downloader. Nothing here produces a file.

Where the texts come from, and credits

The texts in Tests are real articles and the captions of real videos, never written by a model. Each one is shown with its own credit and a link to the original, and where a word was taken out for the test, the credit says so.

Clips and their captions:

Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.
Contains information licensed under the Scottish Parliament Copyright Licence.
Includes material from U.S. federal agencies, in the public domain, and from Voice of America.
The appearance of U.S. Department of War (DoW) visual information does not imply or constitute DoW endorsement.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Includes material from Australian Government agencies licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Includes material from Parliament Television, New Zealand House of Representatives.
Other clips are embedded from their creators’ YouTube channels; all rights remain with their owners.

Accuracy

Captions are imperfect, and automatic captions are more imperfect than most. A match means the caption said the word at that second — usually true, sometimes off by a second or two, occasionally wrong. Use your ears, not our index.

Privacy

Searching needs no account. Sign in with Google, and YouTongue keeps your Library until you delete it. What is stored and what is not: Privacy.

Contact

Questions about the site, your account or Pro: [email protected].
Something misindexed, or something that should not be here at all: the takedown procedure.
Teach English or make videos about it? The partner program.

Questions

Is YouTongue free?

Yes. Search, the clips and the word pages are free, with no account and no limit. A free account adds the Daily dictation and Daily shadowing, flashcards and a Library of your words. Pro ($4.99 a month, $35.99 a year or $69 once) removes the practice limits.

Do I need an account to search?

No. Search and every word page work without one. An account (sign in with Google) is for keeping the words you look up and practising them.

Which accents can I hear?

American, British and Australian English, or all of them at once. The accent is taken from the channel a video comes from, not guessed from a voice.

Does it work for phrases?

Yes. Type a phrase like “to no avail” or “under the weather” and the clips are of the whole phrase. About 19,000 common words and phrases also have a page of their own.

Do the video creators lose anything?

No. Every clip plays in YouTube’s own embedded player and counts as a view of the original video. Nothing is downloaded or uploaded again, and the link back to the channel stays.

How is it different from a dictionary’s audio?

A dictionary plays one careful recording of a word on its own. YouTongue plays the word inside real sentences, at natural speed, from many different speakers — how it sounds when people actually use it.

Can I use it on my phone?

Yes. The site works in any phone browser. On Android, the app lets you select a word in any app and hear it right there.

How do I get a video removed?

Write to [email protected]. The takedown page says what we need and what happens next.

Last updated: 2026-11-04