Cleartext

ClearText is a very simple text editor; yet, it has a unique feature: it will force you to write any text using only the 1000 most common words in one of the supported languages.

Although at the beginnings it only allowed English words, the current version supports quite a long list of other languages, including Russian, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, Czech, Albanian, Croatian, Serbian, Indonesian and Dutch.

The application looks just like any other text editor. In fact, it is so simple that it only allows typing without any type of formatting. While you type, the editor highlights those words that are not in its white list, and if you press the space bar, it simply deletes the infrequent word. And that is about all! Fortunately, ClearText evolved from its earliest versions and now it permits using proper nouns, which were not initially tolerated.

Although there are many circumstances in which you would like to keep your language simple, in most of the occasions 1000 words are probably too few to express most complex thoughts. In my opinion, this tool is a curiosity rather than a practical asset. By the way, I loved the irony of comparing its list of supported words to the language stock of some politicians.