I made a visual sound change applier
Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2026 5:02 am
Hello everyone!
For a while now I've been working on a sound change applier that doesn't require you to learn any notation. I wanted that feeling of building something in Scratch, snapping pieces together and watching it work, but I also wanted it to be genuinely powerful.
I built Leksical with a few things in mind. Above all I wanted it to be user-friendly: a beginner should be able to jump in and actually understand what their rules are doing, without having to learn the notation first. Every rule reads as a plain sentence ("change p to b between vowels"), and you can watch a sample word change live as you build it. There's still a full advanced view with normal notation for when you'd rather just type, and the two stay in sync, so you can switch back and forth.
Leksical isn't only a sound change applier, though. It's also a word generator: you can generate a batch of words and apply your sound changes to them instantly, and the generation rules can be built visually as well as in notation.
It's free, and you can try it without making an account: https://leksical.com/
I'd really love feedback from this crowd in particular: what's missing, what's confusing, and what you'd want from a tool like this. It's being actively worked on, so suggestions genuinely shape where it goes.
For a while now I've been working on a sound change applier that doesn't require you to learn any notation. I wanted that feeling of building something in Scratch, snapping pieces together and watching it work, but I also wanted it to be genuinely powerful.
I built Leksical with a few things in mind. Above all I wanted it to be user-friendly: a beginner should be able to jump in and actually understand what their rules are doing, without having to learn the notation first. Every rule reads as a plain sentence ("change p to b between vowels"), and you can watch a sample word change live as you build it. There's still a full advanced view with normal notation for when you'd rather just type, and the two stay in sync, so you can switch back and forth.
Leksical isn't only a sound change applier, though. It's also a word generator: you can generate a batch of words and apply your sound changes to them instantly, and the generation rules can be built visually as well as in notation.
It's free, and you can try it without making an account: https://leksical.com/
I'd really love feedback from this crowd in particular: what's missing, what's confusing, and what you'd want from a tool like this. It's being actively worked on, so suggestions genuinely shape where it goes.