Read The Picture of Dorian Gray in English — and understand every line.
Read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde 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 Picture of Dorian Gray” begins
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.
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 Picture of Dorian Gray” at level B2 and above, with how many times each one appears.
- soul
- sin
- curious
- dreadful
- merely
- joy
- bear
- charming
- stir
- fellow
- terror
- creep
- exquisite
- shadow
- romance
- glance
- alter
- mere
- canvas
- reveal
- tragedy
- exclaim
- conscious
- charm
- seek
- rose
- whisper
- extraordinary
- subtle
- entirely
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 Picture of Dorian Gray”
How much of each kind of grammar “The Picture of Dorian Gray” uses, counted in the sentences the Reader marks: per 10,000 words, compared with the other books in the library.
- Perfect tenses
- Relative clauses
- Modal verbs
- Passive voice
- Phrasal verbs
- -ing forms and to-infinitives
- Reported speech
- Conditionals
Constructions to look for
- try to do Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
- I used to … “I myself used to have literary ambitions, but I gave them up long ago.
- Whose (possession) Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious.
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
Tap any word to see what it means in this exact sentence — with pronunciation and a clear example.
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Save what matters
Add a word and it comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule timed to how memory actually works.
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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 Picture of Dorian Gray is a great book to read in English
A beautiful young man wishes his portrait would age instead of him — and gets exactly what he asked for. Wilde's only novel (1890) glitters with epigrams; the dialogue is some of the most quotable English ever written, and the dark story underneath keeps the pages turning.
On LangOrbit you read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” 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.
Keep reading
More books to read in English
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
Read “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde 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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