For our initial release we have provided a core subset of Latin and Greek texts. We will expand the list of texts and we are also considering allowing users to upload their own texts. Please let us know if you have an interest in this feature or if there is a specific text or texts you would like to see added.

Alpheios works in the latest mobile versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Alpheios does not work in Internet Explorer or proprietary device browsers.

The application should detect when you access it from a mobile device and present you with the mobile user interface rather than the desktop version. However this may not work properly on all devices.

Signs that you are using the desktop version of the interface on a mobile device:

  • the text is really small
  • you see the Alpheios tools icon floating in the page rather than in the top navigation bar
  • a word lookup produces an in-page popup rather than the split screen panel

If this happens for you, first check to be sure you don't have Desktop Site forced in your mobile browser settings. If that is not the case, please email us a screenshot and your device details so that we can troubleshoot further.

If you try to download your personal wordlist from your iOS device, you may receive an error that says something like "This site can't be reached. The webpage at blob:https://texts.alpheios.net/.... might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new address." This is caused by bug in the iOS operating system. To workaround this problem, login to Alpheios from a desktop or laptop and download your wordlist from there. It should be resolved in a future update of the iOS operating system.

If you have a long wordlist and are accessing Alpheios from a new browser over a slow connection, it may take a few minutes to fully download the wordlist into the browser's cache. Once downloaded to the cache, speed issues should be resolved.

The Alpheios wordlists use the "utf-8" character set encoding. You must be sure to specify utf-8 as the character set encoding in whatever program you import the downloaded file into (such as a spreadsheet program).

If you are using Alpheios in multiple browser tabs, the wordlist will be updated across all tabs with every lookup but you will need to refresh the page in order to see the updates immediately.

This could be caused by one of the following:

  • When we export a wordlist for use in a flashcard program, we exclude any words for which we were not able to retrieve short definitions.
  • The download for flashcards is also limited by default to 25 items. This is to guard against performance issues upon download. You can change this default in the Feature Options but we advise not more than 50.