About

The Verbarium is a free writing checker with a set of smaller writing tools and guides around it. The checker is called Voice & Standards and it stands on the home page: you paste a draft, and it shows every place where the text breaks a rule you set or differs from the way you usually write.

It is made for someone who has a specific thing to write for work today, such as an email, a CV, a notice to customers or a product description, including people who work in English as a second language.

The main tool: Voice & Standards

Voice & Standards compares a draft with three things. The first is the editorial rules you switch on: British or American spelling, one way of writing a date and a time, your own names for things, expressions to avoid, a longest sentence. The second, if you want it, is a writing style: a profile of habits counted in messages you wrote. The third is what a reader could get wrong: a weekday that does not match its date, “next Friday”, a date written in digits.

Every finding says where it comes from, and nothing in your text changes until you press a button. The tool runs in your browser, and the rules and profiles you make are kept on your own device. Open the writing checker. The home page also says what each rule checks, how the writing profile was tested and what the tool cannot do.

The other tools

Each of these does one job. They run in your browser too: what you paste or type is not sent anywhere, and details you ask a form to remember stay on your own device. The Tools page lists them all.

• Before you send: reads a message for what its reader could get wrong, such as a weekday that does not match its date.
• British or American spelling checker: tells you which variety your text is in and which words break it.
• Checker for errors a spellchecker passes: marks sound-alike words, doubled words and “would of”.
• CV phrase checker: marks duty phrases and claims with nothing behind them.
• Out-of-office message builder: writes the message from your dates.
• Empty adjective checker for product descriptions.
• Softener checker for emails.
• Opening hours writer: writes your hours out from the times you set for each day.
• Email length counter: compares the length of your email with 79,569 real work emails.
• One word or two checker: finds “login” where it should be “log in”, and other pairs a spellchecker passes.
• Number and date formats by country: shows how thirteen countries write the same number and date.
• Readability score calculator: scores your text and marks the sentences over 25 words.

Each tool highlights places to look. None of them judges meaning, and each page says what its tool cannot do.

The guides

The guides each take one thing people write at work and deal with it directly. Some show a weak version and a better one and explain what changed. Some report a test we ran. Many carry one of the tools above. They are in four sections.

• Work email: messages to colleagues and clients, such as what an out-of-office message needs to say and whether to delete “just” from your emails.
• Job applications: CV wording, such as what to write instead of “responsible for”.
• Customer wording: notices, replies and descriptions, such as refusing a refund and describing a handmade product.
• Usage and spelling: which word or spelling is right and how to check, such as the mistakes spellcheck misses and words a reader can take two ways.

The Verbarium AI

The “Verbarium AI” button at the foot of most pages opens The Verbarium AI, an automated assistant. Ask it how to word something and it answers in a few lines from the guides on this site, with a link to the guide it used. It can also write or improve a short text for work by the rules those articles set out: an email, a CV, a notice or a reply to a customer, a product description. For a CV it asks for your facts first and uses only those, leaving marked gaps for anything it was not told. Ask it what an article says, or what a page is for, and it tells you in a few lines. When no article covers a question or a kind of text, it says so. It does not do anything outside this subject. Inside each article, the “Ask The Verbarium” box carries a short summary of that article and a few questions about it. The summary and the answers are written from the article’s text and stored, so reading them sends nothing anywhere. In the panel, “Key points of this article” lists the article’s sections, with a link to each. In Voice & Standards, a button with its name on a finding sends that one sentence to be reworded, and puts the new wording into your text, where you can undo it. With the setting “Tone rewrite” switched on, a button at the end of the results sends the whole text, which comes back in a straight, plain tone with its facts, figures and names kept.

It is a machine and it can be wrong, so check anything that matters, and check every fact in a draft before you use it. Unlike the tools above, it does send what you type away from your browser: your messages go to Google, whose model writes the reply. We do not keep them. The details are in the privacy policy.

Who runs it

I’m Kleoniq Kosova, a writer based in Tirana, Albania. I create and edit The Verbarium.

I studied English, German and Spanish at the Faculty of Foreign Languages (Fakulteti i Gjuhëve të Huaja), where I took my bachelor’s and then my master’s degree between October 2021 and September 2026.

Before this site I translated three books and several films from Albanian into English. I have also written more than 500 articles for online publications, among them Celebrimous, Strange Facts and Viral Strange, in the direct style I use here.

Kleoniq Kosova (Instagram: Kle0_98)

How The Verbarium AI surprised me too

I built the assistant for visitors. Its job is to get someone to the right part of an article faster, and I did not expect to learn anything from it myself.

Then one day I was inside an article, checking the edits I had made, and it told me what “am” and “pm” stand for: ante meridiem and post meridiem, Latin for “before noon” and “after noon”. I was 29, with two degrees in languages, and I had never known. The answer was short and straight to the point, with no long paragraphs to get through.

That is what I want it to do for you. The explanation is now part of the article on opening hours, where it turns out to be the reason “12am” and “12pm” confuse people: noon is neither before noon nor after it.

How the guides are made

These rules apply to every guide on the site.

• When an article says something was tested, the test was run, and the article says with what. The spellcheck article, for example, names the four dictionaries and gives the text that was checked.
• Examples and rewrites are written for the article. They are not presented as real emails from real people.
• Nothing on the site claims experience its author does not have. An article on refusing a refund is about the wording, and does not pretend to come from someone who runs a shop.
• Facts about usage are checked against dictionaries and style guides, which are named where they are quoted. Where an article touches the law, it links the official page and says no more than that page does.

Corrections

An “Updated” date appears beside an article’s date only when the article has been substantially revised. Factual errors are fixed and listed, with dates, in the corrections log.

Advertising and contact

The site is independent and intended to be funded by advertising. Advertisers have no say in what is published; the details are in the privacy policy and the disclaimer.

If you find a mistake or disagree with a rewrite, use the contact page or write to TheVerbarium@gmail.com.