Search YouTube captions
in any language

Real examples of words and phrases, straight from native speakers

get away with look forward to figure out come up with by the way in other words nevertheless literally
Popular channels: TED · Lex Fridman · Veritasium · Speak English With Vanessa · English with Lucy · Rachel's English · linguamarina · 3Blue1Brown · Kurzgesagt · engVid
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Words from actual videos
Pronunciation
Hear native speakers
Many languages
Search any language

What is Caption Search?

Caption Search is a free search engine over YouTube captions. Type a word, phrase, or idiom and see real clips of native speakers saying it. Each result starts at the exact second the phrase is spoken.

How it works

  1. 1

    Type something

    Any word, phrase, or idiom works. Wrap a phrase in quotes for exact matches, use learn* as a wildcard, or NEAR(get up, 2) for proximity search.

  2. 2

    See real clips

    Every match comes from a real YouTube caption with surrounding context. Filter by human-written or auto-generated subtitles.

  3. 3

    Hear it spoken

    Click any result to jump to the exact second the phrase is spoken and hear native pronunciation in context.

Who uses Caption Search

Language learners — hear how real people actually talk, not textbook examples.

Writers & translators — check whether a phrase sounds natural in everyday speech.

Linguists & researchers — corpus-scale search across spoken-language data.

Frequently asked

What is Caption Search?

A free tool that indexes YouTube captions so you can see how words and phrases are actually used in speech. Every match links back to the exact moment in the original video.

Is it free?

Yes — no account, no paywall.

How is this different from YouGlish?

No paywall, advanced search syntax (quotes, wildcards, boolean, NEAR proximity), and support for both human and auto-generated captions.

Which languages are supported?

Anywhere YouTube publishes captions. English is the deepest index today; other languages are growing.

Are the captions accurate?

Human-written captions (labeled "Human") are creator-provided and very accurate. Auto-generated captions (labeled "Auto") come from YouTube's speech recognition — usually right, occasionally mishears. Filter to human-only if you want.

Can I search idioms and phrasal verbs?

Yes. Quote an exact phrase ("get away with"), add a wildcard for word stems (learn*), or NEAR(get up, 2) to find words within 2 tokens of each other.

Who built this?

A small indie project focused on making spoken YouTube content searchable. Feedback or questions: hello@captionsearch.app.