Read The Sign of the Four in English — and understand every line.
Read “The Sign of the Four” by Arthur Conan Doyle in English. Tap any word for its meaning, hear how it sounds, and save it to a memory-driven review schedule.
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DICTIONARY
TRANSLATION
apreciar, atesorar
to feel warm affection for; to hold something dear.
Tap a word for its translation and part of speech — then save it to your list.
The opening
How “The Sign of the Four” begins
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff.
For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks.
Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
Public domain — the whole book is yours to read in the app.
Vocabulary
Words to know before you start
The 30 words you will meet most often in “The Sign of the Four” at level B1 and above, with how many times each one appears.
- launch
- hardly
- companion
- major
- fellow
- remark
- remain
- gentleman
- strike
- lip
- captain
- prove
- bear
- mere
- rope
- convict
- shoot
- indeed
- guard
- observe
- passage
- surely
- curious
- servant
- jewel
- scent
- pearl
- truth
- theory
- therefore
The meanings here are the everyday ones. In the reader, tap a word to see the sense this sentence uses.
Grammar
Grammar you will meet in “The Sign of the Four”
How much of each kind of grammar “The Sign of the Four” uses, counted in the sentences the Reader marks: per 10,000 words, compared with the other books in the library.
- Perfect tenses
- Modal verbs
- Relative clauses
- Passive voice
- -ing forms and to-infinitives
- Phrasal verbs
- Reported speech
- Conditionals
Constructions to look for
- Relative clauses with where The man never uttered moan nor moved muscle, but lay where he had fallen.
- Past perfect active He had lit his pipe again, and was leaning back with drooping eyelids.
- -ing clause as adverbial (Feeling tired, …) “I have been working in that getup all day,” said he, lighting his cigar.
Counted the way the Reader shows it: one card per construction in a sentence. Open the book in the Reader and tap a highlighted phrase to see the rule.
Library
What you get while you read
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Tap to translate
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Save what matters
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Grammar in context
Notable structures light up in the text, with a short explanation tied to the sentence you're reading.
About the book
Why The Sign of the Four is a great book to read in English
On LangOrbit you read “The Sign of the Four” with a safety net: the translation is one tap away when a sentence runs long, every word opens its meaning in context and can be saved for spaced-repetition review, and the grammar behind the trickier lines is explained right where you meet it.
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The Sign of the Four
Read “The Sign of the Four” by Arthur Conan Doyle in English. Tap any word for its meaning, hear how it sounds, and save it to a memory-driven review schedule.
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