Mot Juste — A Vocabulary Quiz for People Who Care About the Exact Right Word

2026-05-30

English wasn't my literate language as a young kid — I came to it consciously, as a school language, later than most of my peers. But I loved to read, and somewhere along the way I started keeping a word book: a notebook where I'd catalog new words I found in books, along with the sentence or passage where I'd found them. Not definitions copied from a dictionary, but instances. The word in use, doing something.

That habit made me the kind of person who notices words rather than absorbing them, which turned out to be a strange gift — I ended up with a perfect SAT and ACT English score, and more relevantly, a lasting sense that the right word is a small discovery worth making. The mot juste — French for "the exact right word" — is the name for that feeling: there's always a word that fits better than any other, if you care enough to find it. An adage is not a proverb is not an aphorism. These distinctions feel like a secret language. This quiz is for people who want in.

What it is

Mot Juste is a daily vocabulary quiz built around nine categories: adage, proverb, aphorism, idiom, mot juste, maxim, loanword, epigram, and euphemism. Each session gives you ten questions — a short story where a word is missing, and four choices for what it should be. The story is the context that earns the word its meaning.

Correct answers fill in a bingo-style grid on the home screen. Each category has its own color. When you unlock one for the first time, the square pops. Progress syncs across devices if you sign in with a magic link — no password, no friction.

What I built it with

Astro with React components, Tailwind, and EB Garamond because the aesthetic needed to feel like a very good reference book. Supabase handles auth (magic link email) and stores progress — earned categories, streak, last played date — so the bingo board follows you between browsers. Deployed on Netlify, connected to a custom subdomain on this site.

The quiz cards themselves are a hand-curated JSON file. Each word has a short story, a correct answer, and three distractors chosen to be genuinely tricky — close enough in meaning that you have to know the distinction, not just recognize the word.

Why a quiz and not a glossary

A glossary is something you reference. A quiz is something that makes you retrieve, and retrieval is what actually builds memory. I wanted to know these words — not know of them — and the only way to do that is to be wrong about them a few times first. The story format forces you to feel the distinction in context, not just read a definition.