Custom Word Lists

Why a list of your own is worth more

Random practice text is fair but arbitrary. A list of your own is neither. Three things it can do that a generic word list cannot:

• The words you will actually hear. If you work the same net every week, you will hear those twelve callsigns far more often than any word in a frequency list.
• The ones you keep missing. Write down what you got wrong last session and practise exactly that. Ten minutes on twenty problem words beats an hour of everything.
• Real context. Names, places and abbreviations behave differently from random letters - they have rhythms you start to recognise as a whole.

What gets rejected, and why you are told

After reading a list you get a report: how many entries were taken, and what was left out grouped by reason. That report is the point of this tool, not a nicety.

A list that silently drops half of what you gave it is worse than one that refuses outright. You would practise for twenty minutes before noticing that every word with an umlaut is missing. So four things are named explicitly:

• Already present - the same entry twice. Case does not make it different: Anna and ANNA are one word.
• Too long - over 40 characters. That is a sentence, and sentences belong in the dictation exercise, where the scoring suits them.
• List full - past 1000 entries. Named separately from "too long" on purpose, otherwise the message would send you off shortening perfectly good words.
• Characters with no Morse code - checked against the same table the translator uses, so there is no second opinion about what can be sent.

If less than 80% of the file survives, that is said plainly rather than buried. It usually means you picked the wrong column of a spreadsheet.

Files it will read

Plain text with one entry per line, or a simple CSV. Lines are split at commas, semicolons and tabs, and surrounding quotes are stripped - which covers what a spreadsheet exports.

What it deliberately is not is a full CSV parser. A field like "Meier, Anna" will be split at the comma rather than held together. For practice lists that is the right call: an entry containing a comma is not a practice word anyway, and a half-working parser would be worse than none, because it would look like it could cope.

Everything happens in your browser. The file is read here and sent nowhere; saved lists live in your browser's local storage and disappear if you clear it. Export them if they matter.

Practising a list the useful way

Entries do not come up at random. The list is played through in shuffled order and only reshuffled when it has been used up, so every entry comes round equally often. Pure randomness would give you the same word twice in a row often enough to annoy, and with twenty entries you might see only three of them in five goes.

If you have used the Koch trainer, the report also tells you which characters your list needs that you have not unlocked yet - sorted by how many entries they block. That is the difference between a list that pushes you forward and one you simply fail at without knowing why.