Printable Flashcards: Make a Deck From Your Own Word List

Paste a vocabulary list and get cut-out flashcards laid out on A4 or US Letter. Sizes from two cards per sheet to twenty, printed in your browser, nothing uploaded.

By Print Studio Published 2026-09-17 Updated 2026-09-17

Paste one term per line and the sheets are laid out as you type. Everything happens in this browser: the list is not sent anywhere, and the page works with the network disconnected.

Your word list stays in this browser. No account, no upload, no server side. Cards are drawn in millimetres and cut lines are printed so the deck comes out even.

Cards per sheet Print size Sheet footer Print the sheet number and a note about the cut lines

Sheets · live previewA4 · 210 × 297 mm

One card per line. Separate the two sides with a vertical bar, a colon, an equals sign or a tab. A line with no separator becomes a term-only card.

What one line becomes

The input is deliberately unglamorous: one card per line, and a separator between the two sides. The separator can be a vertical bar, a colon, an equals sign, a tab, or a spaced hyphen. That matters more than it sounds — vocabulary lists arrive from a spreadsheet column, a word processor table, a PDF copy-paste or a chat message, and a tool that demands one exact format makes the reader clean the data before they can start. If a line has no separator, it becomes a card showing just the term, which is the right result for prompt cards, spelling drills and picture labelling.

A leading or trailing line of whitespace is harmless, and so are blank lines between groups. Blank lines are simply skipped, so a list copied with gaps between chapters still produces a clean deck.

Cards per sheet, and what each size is actually for

The sheet is divided on a grid with a 2.5 mm gutter between cards and an 8 mm margin to the edge. Type size follows the card size, so a two-per-sheet deck and a twenty-per-sheet deck are both legible at their own scale rather than one being unreadably small.

Cards per sheet	Each card, on A4	Reading it means	Suits
2	194 × 140 mm	An index card in landscape	Diagrams, long definitions, one card per lesson
4	95 × 140 mm	A playing card, portrait	Sentence prompts, translations with examples
6	140 × 92 mm	A little wider than a playing card	Definitions that run to two lines
8	95 × 68 mm	A business-card footprint	The standard drill deck for vocabulary
12	95 × 45 mm	Three rows of four	Short pairs: word and gloss, symbol and name
20	46 × 55 mm	A small square	A whole set on one sheet for pocket carrying

The trade-off is not paper economy, it is writing room. A card that only ever holds a term and a two-word definition can be small; the moment a definition runs to a full sentence, the 8-per-sheet grid starts wrapping to three lines with no space left for a diagram or an annotation. If the material needs a sketch, go to two or four per sheet and accept the extra sheets.

Cutting a deck that stays square

Cards cut freehand end up trapezoidal, and a deck of uneven cards is annoying to shuffle. Two practices fix it.

Print one sheet at 100 percent scale with the paper size matching the selector. Verify the cut lines by holding the sheet against a window or a lamp so the dashed guides show through, then check that the outermost guide is the same distance from both edges.
Cut along the outer border first, then cut the internal lines in one pass with a rotary trimmer or a straight edge and a craft knife. Cutting each card out individually is slower and less accurate than trimming the grid down.
If you are printing many decks, set a heavier stock and cut two or three sheets at a time. A guillotine handles a stack; scissors do not.

The dashed guides are drawn in a light grey on purpose, so that a slightly wandering cut line is not the most visible mark on the finished card. They are visible enough to follow and faint enough to forgive.

Printing on both sides, and why this page does not

A double-sided flashcard — term on the front, definition on the back — is genuinely useful, and it also needs the second page mirrored. When a duplex sheet is flipped on its long edge, the back of the left-hand column is the right-hand column of the front. A layout that does not account for this produces a deck where every definition sits behind the wrong term, which is worse than no deck at all because it is only discovered after cutting.

There are two reasonable ways to get a two-sided deck out of this page. Print single-sided and staple or band the cards into packs, which is what most classroom decks actually are. Or print two sheets — one of terms, one of definitions — and cut a set of each; place them back to back and hold them together in a sleeve, then write on both sides by hand if a permanent version is needed. A printer that supports duplex with a mirrored layout will do the job in one pass, but the mirroring has to be applied to the file, and that is outside what this page generates.

What the sheet cannot do for you

No pronunciation, audio or example sentences. The card holds the text you typed and nothing else. If the term needs an example, put the example in the second field and keep it short.
No images, no icons, no symbols beyond what your keyboard can type. Cards are text only.
No duplicate checking. A term that appears twice produces two identical cards. Sorting the list before pasting is faster than hunting for the duplicate afterwards.
No wide-character handwriting guides. The definition line is sized for Latin text; scripts with different vertical proportions may look loose or tight at a given card size.
No storage beyond this browser. The draft is in local storage and goes away if the browser data is cleared. Keep the word list somewhere you control.

Printable checklist — the same idea applied to tasks rather than terms.
Lined paper — for writing the extra examples a card cannot hold.
Printable planner — a revision schedule to decide which cards to drill today.
Custom paper templates — the hub for graph, dot, ruled and checklist stock.
Print at the right size — the checklist for A4 against Letter, exact scaling and PDF output.
Printer margin guide — why a cut line near the edge can be cropped, and how to measure it.

Keep this setup

Save the settings to your Sitefarm account. Uploaded files and generated results are not stored.

Before you hit print

What format does the word list need to be in?

One card per line. Put the term first, then a separator, then the definition: a vertical bar, an equals sign, a colon or a tab all work, so a list pasted straight out of a spreadsheet or a document usually needs no cleaning. A line with no separator becomes a card with a term only, which is what you want for prompt cards.

How many cards fit on a sheet?

From two to twenty, and the choice is a trade-off rather than a matter of taste. Bigger cards give room for a diagram or a long definition but waste paper on short ones; twenty small cards fit a whole vocabulary set on one sheet but leave very little writing space per card.

Is my word list sent anywhere?

No. The list is read in this browser and the cards are drawn here. The page makes no network requests at all, so the list cannot reach a server even in principle. A draft of the list is kept in this browser's local storage so a refresh does not lose it, and the clear button removes that draft.

Can I print on both sides of the sheet?

Not from this page — the layout is single-sided. Printing term and definition on opposite sides of the same card requires the second page to be mirrored horizontally, because a two-sided sheet is flipped on its long edge and the back of the left-hand column lands under the right-hand column. Doing that by hand with a sheet of A4 and a straight edge is usually faster than getting a printer to collate it.

Why not just print a deck someone else made?

Because the words that need drilling are specific to one class, one exam or one chapter, and a downloaded deck almost never matches. Generating from your own list is the whole point: it takes about as long as typing the list, and the result is a deck that matches the material in front of you.

What paper should flashcards be printed on?

Ordinary 80 gsm paper works and is cheap, but a card that will be shuffled repeatedly benefits from something heavier — 120 to 160 gsm holds its edge and does not crease when it is held at one corner. Anything a home printer can feed through its paper path is fine; check the printer's specification before buying a ream of heavy stock.