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Words in Context MCP Server

not responding

Words in Context is listed as active in the registry but did not answer our last check. It exposes 3 tools.

Words-in-context vocabulary practice questions with distractor explanations.

The linked repository no longer exists on GitHub — it was deleted or made private.

Uptime history 5 days of history · worst day 5%
5 days agonow
6.5%
Uptime 24h
6 of 93 checks
3
Tools
read from the server
1121 ms
Response time
average over 24h
open, no key
Access
streamable-http

Words in Context does not always answer

Over the last week it answered 71.0% of our checks. We check every 15 minutes, so you hear about the next outage within the hour — not from your users.

Three servers free · no card

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 4 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add words-in-context --transport http https://words-in-context.gumballtools.com/api/mcp
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "words-in-context": {
      "url": "https://words-in-context.gumballtools.com/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.words-in-context]
url = "https://words-in-context.gumballtools.com/api/mcp"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "words-in-context": {
      "url": "https://words-in-context.gumballtools.com/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "words-in-context": {
      "url": "https://words-in-context.gumballtools.com/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 3

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

answer
check_answer
Check an answer to a practice item and get the teaching content. Returns whether the choice was correct, which option was right, why it fits the sentence specifically, why the chosen option was wrong, and the reason EVERY distractor fails. Read the distractor reasons out to the learner even when they answered correctly. Knowing why the tempting wrong answer was tempting is the part that transfers to the next question; being told "correct" teaches nothing. Input: `id` from a draw response, and `choice` as the zero-based index of the selected option.
draw
draw_items
Draw words-in-context vocabulary practice questions from a curated, human-written bank. Use this to quiz a learner, build a practice set, or check what a question of this type looks like. It is free, deterministic, and costs no inference. IMPORTANT: the response deliberately contains NO answer index and NO explanations. That is so you can present the questions without leaking the answers. Call `check_answer` with the item id and the chosen option to get the answer, why it fits, and why each distractor fails. Input: `count` (1-20, default 5) — an out-of-range count is REFUSED rather than clamped, so you learn the limit. `difficulty` is foundation|core|stretch. `theme` is science|humanities|social-science|literature. `seed` makes the draw reproducible: the same seed always returns the same items, so a practice session can be replayed or shared. Format note: these test inference from context, which is how the current digital SAT asks about vocabulary — not recall of definitions. Each item is a sentence with one word blanked and four options.
generate
generate_items
Generate new practice items from a passage the learner supplies — their own reading, or the material they got wrong. This is the PAID tier and it costs real money per call, unlike the curated bank. Prefer `draw_items` unless the learner specifically needs questions from their own material. `model` is a priced choice: "economy" at $0.002 per item (Fast and cheap. Good enough for straightforward vocabulary in clear prose.); "standard" at $0.008 per item (Better at writing distractors that are genuinely tempting, which is the hard part of a good practice item.). Pick economy for straightforward prose and standard when the distractors need to be genuinely tempting, which is the hard part of a good question. Limits: passage 200 characters minimum, and `count` at most 5 per call. Generation is capped at 10 calls per caller per day, separately from the free quota. Generated items are NOT reviewed by a person. Every response carries a caveat saying so. Check the answer and the distractor reasons before giving them to a learner — a generated question with two defensible answers is worse than no question. Returns 503 when generation is not enabled on the deployment; fall back to `draw_items`.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://words-in-context.gumballtools.com/api/mcp streamable-http answering 187 ms 4 min ago

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Words in Context — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Words in Context do?
It exposes 3 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: check_answer, draw_items, generate_items. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →
Is Words in Context working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 6 of 93 checks got a reply (6.5%), average response time 1121 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
Is Words in Context still maintained?
The linked repository no longer exists on GitHub — it was deleted or made private. We show this because it changes what you can expect: an unmaintained server may keep answering for months and then stop without warning.
The registry lists Words in Context as active — why does it not respond?
The official MCP registry stores what the author submitted; it does not verify that the server still runs. We check the endpoint ourselves, and this one does not answer. Catalogues that copy the registry without checking will show it as working.
How do I connect Words in Context?
Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does Words in Context need an API key?
No. Words in Context completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 3 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is Words in Context?
It answers our handshake in 1121 ms on average, which is faster than 6% of all working MCP servers we measure. That is on the slow side — worth knowing if the tool sits inside an interactive loop. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.