Submitting an image

Start from the word

Anyone with an account can upload their own image, free, and generate up to 20 a month with our tool on the free plan (more on Plus or Studio). Voting, commenting, suggesting words and reporting are free for everyone, and are most of what decides a word. Every word page on the community site has a submission box. If the word has no image yet, the box is the first thing on the page. If it has some, it's below them, and the question to ask before you add another is: does mine hook the sound better than what's there?

The keyword is the whole idea

An image is only as good as its sound-alike. Cerradura (lock) became "cereal door": a door made of a cereal box, padlocked. The keyword should:

• Sound like the Spanish, said out loud. Spelling doesn't matter; sound does. "Sarah, the door!" and "cereal door" both work for cerradura.
• Be something you can draw. An object or a short scene. "Freedom" is a bad keyword; "free dumb bell" is a good one.
• Connect to the meaning in one gesture. The cereal door has a padlock. The pear-oar dog is a dog. The meaning should be in the image, the sound should be in the keyword.

The optional "why it works" line is where you say the gesture out loud: "a door made of a cereal box, held shut by a big padlock." The person drawing it, human or house, uses it.

Route one: generate

Type the keyword and press Generate. The house draws it in the app's style, in about ten to fifteen seconds: flat cartoon, bold outlines, one solid ground in the word's gender colour, and no writing. You see the exact prompt before you press, and only your keyword and your why are in it; the style is the house's. The button locks while it draws, so one press is one image.

Free includes 20 generated images a month, Plus 30, Studio 50; being right in votes earns extra credits on top. A small daily ceiling also applies to everyone, as a cost backstop. What each plan includes.

Route two: upload your own

Every member can upload an image they made, free, up to 10 a month on the free plan. It follows the same standard as the images our own generator draws. Making your own image, step by step has the exact colour codes and how to set up the canvas.

• Square.
• One flat background in the word's colour, edge to edge: coral for feminine, teal for masculine, sand for none. No frame, no sky, no picture in a box.
• No writing anywhere in the image. Not the word, not a sign, not "BOO!", not a brand on a t-shirt. The app writes every word itself.
• One big, clear subject: the sound-alike doing something with the meaning.
• Flat cartoon look: bold outlines, simple shapes, flat colours. No photos, no gradients.
• Yours to share. Nothing you don't have the right to use; no real people; no brand logos.

The machine checks that an image is square, that its background is the word's colour, and that there is no writing in it; one that misses waits for a moderator instead of going live. It can't judge the idea, so that is down to moderators and to members' votes and reports.

The gate: every image is checked before anyone sees it

A new image is born pending. An automated safety scan looks at it first, for nudity, racy content and violence, and an upload is also checked for the square shape and the word's colour; a clean result releases it to voting with no person involved. A flagged or unreadable image is held, and a moderator sees the reason and decides. Until the scanner is switched on for a language, a moderator releases every image by hand. Either way: a vote can rank an image, it can never admit one. Safety is not a vote.

What happens next

1. Released. Your image appears on the word page and in the home page's "fresh images" strip. You get an email if you've added one.
2. Voted on. Members vote it up or down; learners on the phone pick it or another. Comments tell you why.
3. Settled. When one image leads clearly enough (the three conditions), the word settles.
4. Chosen. The winner is published to the app. Your name carries a "image chosen" badge from then on.

Or it isn't chosen, which is fine. An image that stays at five or more downvotes from five or more people for 48 hours is retired by the system as "community rejected". No mark against you; three removals by a moderator in 30 days is a different matter, covered in the rules.

Reporting an image

Under every image: report this image, with a reason. It goes back behind the gate at once if enough weight is behind the reports, and is re-scanned when the scanner is on. Reports that stand up pay; reports that don't, cost. The numbers are in Reports, penalties and how they lift.