lingro was conceived in August 2005, when Artur decided to practice his Spanish by reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal.
As a competent but non-expert speaker, he found that looking up new vocabulary
took much more time than the reading itself. Frustrated with how slow existing online dictionaries were, he wrote a program to help him translate and learn words
in their original context. lingro's mission is to create an on-line environment that allows anyone learning a
language to quickly look up and learn the vocabulary most important to them.