No form, no ticket system, and no team hiding behind the word "we". Mail here goes to one inbox, and the person reading it is the one who writes the words.

I could tell you when a reply arrives, but the honest answer is katotaan, and that page explains exactly how little that promises. In practice it is a few days, sometimes a week, longer if the inbox has quietly got away from me. A second message is welcome rather than rude - it usually means the first one got buried, not ignored.

English or Finnish are both fine. English gets answered faster; Finnish gets read more slowly, with a dictionary open, which is roughly the situation this whole site is about.

Corrections

These are the most useful messages the site gets. If a word is wrong, sounds dated, or does not work where you live, say so - a sentence is plenty, and corrections go into the page rather than into a backlog.

Every word here ships with its sources listed at the bottom of the page, and most of them lead back to Kotus and Kielitoimiston sanakirja. That still leaves a gap no dictionary closes: whether a word sounds normal, dated or slightly off coming out of a stranger's mouth, this year, where you live. That judgement is the thing a native speaker has and a source does not.

What makes a correction usable

No form, no template - but four things turn a message into an edit rather than a question:

The word, and the page. A link is easiest.
Where you are. Finnish varies enough that "nobody says this" and "nobody in Turku says this" are different corrections, and the second is the more useful one - it usually means the region shown on the card is wrong rather than the word itself.
Roughly how old you are. Not personal - a word that reads as current to one generation and as dated to the next is exactly the thing the page should be saying out loud, and it cannot without knowing which is which.
What you would say instead. Even approximately. A replacement is worth more than a flag.

A correction that changes what a page claims gets applied to the page and the page gets re-dated, so the "updated" line under the headword means a real revision rather than a touched file. Nothing is credited by name unless you ask for it.

A word that is missing

Plenty are. Suggestions are welcome, and the most valuable ones are the words no course will ever hand you: what gets said in the coffee room, what your partner's family says at the summer place, what a group chat does to spelling at one in the morning.

Two things make a suggestion easy to turn into a card. One line of how you would actually use it, because the sentence is the part that cannot be looked up. And the written form, if the spoken one is a contraction of something - mun for minun, that pairing is the whole premise of the site rather than a footnote on it.

Regional words are the most welcome of all, because they are the hardest to run into from one city.

The newsletter

Every email has a one-click unsubscribe at the bottom and it takes effect immediately. If it ever does not, reply to the email itself and the address comes off by hand. Replies reach the same inbox as the address above, so whichever is easier is the right one.

Privacy and data requests

Access, correction, erasure, or withdrawing a consent you gave earlier - email works, and it lands in the same place as everything else. The privacy policy has the full route, the legal basis for each request and the retention periods; the "Cookie settings" link in the footer reopens the consent prompt if that is all you need. Plain language is fine, and better than an article number: say what you want done and it gets done.

Something is broken, or the photo is yours

A dead link, a page that breaks on your phone, a card that will not load - worth a line. So is anything that reads as an error rather than a choice.

The photographs are other people's work under free licences, credited in the caption with the photographer and the licence. If a credit is wrong, or a photo is yours and the licence record does not match what you published it under, say so and it gets corrected or removed the same day. The illustrations are the site's own artwork; what may be reused and what may not is set out in the terms.

Press, teaching, and reuse

Quoting a sentence or two with a link back needs no permission. Anything larger - a word card in a deck, a table in a newsletter, a set of examples in a classroom - is usually fine too, so ask; the answer is normally yes and it is interesting to know where things end up. Press and partnership mail is read. Most of it does not get a reply, which is not personal.

Elsewhere

Nowhere yet. The social icons in the footer are placeholders for accounts that do not exist, and they point at the paragraph that says so rather than at an empty profile. When one of them is real it will be linked from there. Until then email is the only way in, which at least means there is no second inbox for a message to get lost in.

Who reads it

One person: Andrey, who writes the site. There is no support desk and no shared inbox, which is the reason a reply can take a week and the reason a correction can be live the same day. More about who is behind this, and how the words are researched, is on the about page.

Who operates this site

Finnish IRL is operated by Data Sauna LLC, a single-member limited liability company formed in the State of Wyoming, United States, with a registered office at 30 N Gould St, Ste R, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. That is a registered agent's address rather than a door to knock on - there is no office, and the company is one person with a laptop. That entity is the data controller for anything you send here - see privacy.

There is no phone number, and there is not going to be one. A one-person site taking calls across several timezones would go badly for both of us, and anything worth a record should be in writing anyway.