Sanskrit English Dictionary

From the Preface: The aim of the present work is to satisfy within the compass of a comparatively handy volume all the practical wants not only of learners of Sanskrit but also of scholars for purposes of ordinary reading. 

When I began my task in 1886 there was no available work which supplied the deficiency. The only one having a somewhat similar end in view, the Sanskrit-English Lexicon of my respected teacher, the late Theodore Benfey, was already out of print. By the time, however, that my manuscript was half finished, no fewer than three small Sanskrit dictionaries had been published. It may perhaps be advisable to indicate some of the points in which the present work differs from and compares with them. In the first place, it is much more copious. Excluding all words and meanings which occur in native lexicographers, but cannot be quoted from actual literature, my book contains nearly double as much material as any of the dictionaries in question. The present work is, moreover, the only one of the four, which is transliterated. It can thus be used, for example, by comparative philologists not knowing a single letter of the Devanagari alphabet. None of the others is etymological in any sense. This feature of my dictionary increases both its usefulness from a linguistic point of view and its practical value to the student, who will always better remember the meaning of a word, the derivation of which is made clear to him. Lastly, this is the only one of the lexicons in question which indicates not only with respect to words, but also to their meanings, the literary period to which they belong and the frequency or rarity of their occurrence. This addition I regard as both scientifically and practically important.