Your intelligent co-editor.

In 1501, Aldus Manutius did something radical. He took the book, heavy, expensive, chained to lecterns in the libraries of the wealthy, and made it portable. Suddenly, reading was not a privilege of institutions. It belonged to anyone who wanted it.

That instinct has driven every meaningful advance in writing since: the belief that the tools of thought should be accessible, not guarded. The printing press made knowledge reproducible. The typewriter made it independent of the scribe. The word processor made it fluid and painless fluid. The internet made publication free. Each shift democratised a different part of the craft, and each was met with resistance before it became indispensable.

But one part of the process has been left behind. Real editing. The kind that requires a skilled reader with judgment, care, and an understanding of what the writer is trying to do. It has remained either expensive or shallow. You can pay thousands. You can use AI to completely rewrite your prose. For most writers, there has been nothing in between.

Words are, as Helen Barolini wrote of Aldus, the most “accessible vehicle of thought and communication.” To write is to think in public. To edit is to think again, more carefully, with the help of a reader who is paying closer attention than you can pay to your own work. Not a machine that automates the output. Not a machine that rewrites humanity out of itself.

Wordsmith is not a tool that writes for you. It is a reader that reads with you. It suggests. It responds. It is a deliberate supplement to the writer working to put thought into language. We are building what Aldus built, in an age of the plenitude of words: a new way to make good writing widespread and available.