Last updated September 9, 2023
This page allows you to search a Sanskrit term across most of the dictionaries available online, all at once. You can input terms in the International Alphabet for Sanskrit Transliteration or in the Velthuis encoding scheme. See below for more details on input conventions.
The available dictionaries are given in the table below.
| Year | Name | Language |
|---|---|---|
| 1832 | Wilson Sanskrit-English Dictionary | en |
| 1846 | Yates Sanskrit-English Dictionary | en |
| 1847 | Bopp Glossarium Sanscritum | la |
| 1855 | Böhtlingk and Roth Grosses Petersburger Wörterbuch | de |
| 1856 | Goldstücker Sanskrit-English Dictionary | en |
| 1861 | Abhidhānaratnamālā of Halāyudha | sa |
| 1866 | Benfey Sanskrit-English Dictionary | en |
| 1866 | Burnouf Dictionnaire Sanscrit-Français | fr |
| 1872 | Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1st ed.) | en |
| 1873 | Vācaspatyam | sa |
| 1873 | Grassmann Wörterbuch zum Rig Veda | de |
| 1879 | Böhtlingk Sanskrit-Wörterbuch in kürzerer Fassung | de |
| 1884 | Bergaigne Études sur le lexique du Ṛgveda | fr |
| 1884 | Lanman’s Sanskrit Reader Vocabulary | en |
| 1885 | Whitney Roots | en |
| 1886 | Śabdakalpadruma | sa |
| 1887 | Cappeller Sanskrit Wörterbuch | de |
| 1890 | Apte Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary | en |
| 1891 | Cappeller Sanskrit-English Dictionary | en |
| 1893 | Macdonell Sanskrit-English Dictionary | en |
| 1899 | Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary (2nd ed.) | en |
| 1900 | Śabdasāgara Sanskrit-English Dictionary | en |
| 1904 | Index to the Names in the Mahābhārata | en |
| 1906 | Caland & Henry Termes techniques de l’Agniṣṭoma | fr |
| 1912 | The Vedic Index of Names and Subjects | en |
| 1928 | Schmidt Nachträge zum Sanskrit-Wörterbuch | de |
| 1932 | Stchoupak Dictionnaire Sanscrit-Français | fr |
| 1951 | The Purāṇa Index | en |
| 1953 | Edgerton Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary | en |
| 1954 | Renou Vocabulaire du rituel védique | fr |
| 1957 | Renou Terminologie grammaticale du Sanskrit | fr |
| 1958 | Renou Études sur le vocabulaire du Ṛgveda | fr |
| 1959 | Apte Enlarged Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary | en |
| 1962 | Aufrecht’s Catalogus Catalogorum | en |
| 1965 | Kṛdantarūpamālā | sa |
| 1966 | Indian Epigraphical Glossary | en |
| 1974 | Meulenbeld’s Sanskrit Names of Plants | en |
| 1975 | Puranic Encyclopedia | en |
| 1978 | Personal and Geographical Names in the Gupta Inscriptions | en |
| 1993 | Mahābhārata Cultural Index | en |
| 2000 | Tāntrikābhidhānakośa | fr/en/de |
Here is how to input each phoneme:
| अ a ' | आ ā aa | इ i | ई ī ii | उ u | ऊ ū uu |
| ऋ ṛ r̥ .r | ॠ ṝ r̥̄ .rr | ऌ ḷ l̥ .l | ॡ ḹ l̥̄ .ll | ||
| ए e | ऐ ai | ओ o | औ au | ||
| अं ṃ ṁ .m | अः ḥ .h | ||||
| क k | ख kh | ग g | घ gh | ङ ṅ f "n | |
| च c | छ ch | ज j | झ jh | ञ ñ ~n | |
| ट ṭ .t | ठ ṭh .th | ड ḍ .d | ढ ḍh .dh | ण ṇ .n | |
| त t | थ th | द d | ध dh | न n | |
| प p | फ ph | ब b | भ bh | म m | |
| य y | र r | ल l | व v | ||
| श ś z | ष ṣ .s | स s | ह h | ||
| ळ ḻ ł _l |
To represent a hiatus, either follow the convention of adding a diaeresis to the second vowel—as in praüga—or insert a space character between the two vowels—as in pra uga.
At the top of dictionary entries, immediately after the headword, you are often given a list of terms that might be the same as the one you looked for, or that might be related to it, grammatically speaking. For instance, within the entry gandharva, you will find links to the entries gandharbba, gandharvaḥ, gandharvva, gandharvvaḥ and gaṃdharvaḥ.
These clusters of terms are generated mechanically through a set of rules, and can thus be inaccurate. Some cases are inherently ambiguous. For instance, a term that ends with -ī might either be a stem or the nominative masculine singular of a term that ends with -in. I am experimenting with machine learning to address these issues, but much work remains to be done. The end goal is to make this aggregation process transparent.
As a general rule, when searching for nouns and adjectives, you should input the stem instead of a declined form, and then follow cross-references, if any. If the term you are looking for does not appear as a stem in any of the available dictionaries, you will still probably find it among suggested approximate matches.
It is sometimes useful to browse through terms. You can jump to a given location in the dictionaries lexicon by typing the hash symbol # in the search field, followed by a few characters. While doing so, you will be presented with a list of terms that start with the prefix you typed so far. This autocomplete feature is currently only available for romanized input.
Confirming the query will bring you to the first term that starts with the prefix you typed, or, if there is none, to the closest term that follows it, lexicographically speaking. Try for instance the query #uddhār. Submitting the query # just brings you to the very beginning of the lexicon.
It is possible to find terms that match a pattern by using wildcard characters. The question mark character ? matches a single phoneme; the star character * matches a sequence of zero or more phonemes. Thus, for instance:
Note that matching is performed at the phoneme level, not at the character level. Thus a?i matches abhi, but ab?i does not match it, since bh represents a single phoneme.
It is also possible to find terms through approximate matching—sometimes called ‘fuzzy matching.’ The metric used for comparing strings is the Levenshtein distance. This matching mode is enabled by appending a tilde ~ at the end of the search string. The query mandra~, for instance, returns terms like mandra, maṃdra, madra, mantra, etc.
Approximate matching can be performed with wildcard patterns, not just string literals. This is particularly useful for finding occurrences of a given term within compounds, where sandhi can occur. The query *uddyota~, for instance, matches terms that end with something close to uddyota, and returns, among else, uddyota, śāntyuddyota, ācāroddyota, udyota, etc.
Most of the above dictionaries were prepared and encoded by Jim Funderburk, Thomas Malten et al. at Cologne University. The textual version of Whitney’s Roots comes from Peter Scharf, with some emendations of my own. The enlarged edition of Apte’s dictionary is derived from the data prepared at the University of Chicago.
I prepared indices for the following dictionaries: