What is it?
Ampersand Lab is a British English reference and teaching platform for adult learners. It began as a free reference site for phrasal verbs, idioms, prepositions and conditionals, and now also carries private online lessons taught by Aaron.
Everything in the reference section is free to use and needs no account.
What is in it
Where the content comes from
- How common a phrasal verb is
- The 150 most common phrasal verbs are numbered from the PHaVE List (Garnier and Schmitt, 2015), which counts how often each appears in a large collection of real English. No. 1 is the most common. Other phrasal verbs carry no number, because there is no reliable count for them.
- British English
- Spelling, idiom and usage are British throughout. Where usage differs from American English, the British form is given.
- Curated
- Definitions and examples are written and reviewed for teaching use rather than scraped from a dictionary.
How it is built
The platform is self-hosted and built entirely from free and open source software: Astro for the site, Directus as the content store, PostgreSQL, Meilisearch for search, and LiveKit for online classrooms. The source is licensed underAGPL-3.0.
There is no advertising, and no third-party analytics or tracking of any kind. See GDPR compliance for exactly what is and is not collected.
Lessons with Aaron
Private online English lessons for adults, taught one to one.