AP — Apte Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1890 / 1957 revised)

Chapter authored per Decision 29 Tier A. Position 4 in the atlas ordering — the modern successor that shows how the 18-block apparatus reads on a 20th-century artefact.

Trust Block

• Evidence: CDSL v02 ap.txt, src/data/cross-dict.json, and linked dictionary-profile/audit notes.
• Limitations: narrative atlas profile; counts summarize committed/generated artifacts and do not replace source edition inspection.
• Validation: checked by npm run build; chapter consistency is tracked in _consistency_audit.
• Owner repo: csl-atlas.
• Next use: use this dictionary profile as context, then open source-linked records or compare the lemma in Reader Lookup.

1. Overview

Vaman Shivaram Apte's Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary, first published 1890, revised and enlarged in the 1957 three-volume edition digitised in CDSL. A practical reference designed for active reading of classical Sanskrit literature, particularly the kāvya and śāstra corpora, with substantial coverage of the Aṣṭādhyāyī terminology. The most recent dictionary in the CDSL bilingual set and the only modern (post-1899) work in the atlas. AP's distinguishing structural feature is its maximum type-citation differentiation (spread 15.2 pts — the largest in CDSL): Apte chose to cite the literary apparatus heavily for adjectives and indeclinables and lightly for nouns, reflecting his pedagogical orientation toward reading rather than reference.

2. Profile table

Per PAPER.md §5, restricted to the types AP's data supports:

Citation profile spread: 15.2 pts — the largest in CDSL. Apte cites indeclinables (sandhi particles, sentence connectives) most heavily (49.6 %), nouns less so (34–41 %), and the unmarked "other" residual (most of the corpus — verbal lemmas and compounds carry grammar in prose) least (28.1 %). The spread reflects pedagogical purpose: the indeclinables Apte cites are the connectives a student of Sanskrit literature must recognise; the nouns are mostly content-words where the gloss alone suffices.

Block-presence by name:

3. Citation density and apparatus

0.69 <ls> per record — between PWK (0.51) and MW (1.09). Top 12 sigla:

Sigla profile: mixed scholarly (Mb., Rām., Subhāṣ., Pt., Ś.) + Apte-specific abbreviations (L. D. B., Nm., Tv.) reflecting the 19th-century Indian editorial tradition the 1890 edition emerged from. The 1957 revision (digitised) added but did not replace the 1890 apparatus.

4. Hedge analysis — AP has exactly one <ls>L.</ls>

AP carries exactly 1 generic <ls>L.</ls> hedge (analysis/LS_HEDGE_CHECK.md) — making it the only CDSL dictionary other than MW that uses the hedge at all. The single occurrence is anomalous (probably an editorial inheritance from a source that MW had hedged) and does not reflect a systematic Apte design — AP's editorial discipline is to name the source wherever possible. This single hedge instance is consistent with AP being a post-MW work that inherited some MW conventions selectively.

The 1957 revision predates the wide use of MW's tagged form by digital-edition standards, so the hedge does not propagate further: of the 8 other CDSL bilingual + Sanskrit-Sanskrit dictionaries, only MW (40,212×) and AP (1×) carry any L. instances.

5. Lineage statement

AP occupies the modern-successor position in the CDSL European-Sanskrit-lexicography lineage. Apte (1858–1892) was educated at Deccan College, Pune, in the late-19th-century Indian indological tradition that incorporated PWG + MW alongside indigenous-kosha scholarship. The 1890 dictionary draws on PWG (cited as <ls>BR.</ls> or <ls>PW.</ls> in some entries) and MW 1872 (cited as <ls>MW.</ls>); the 1957 revision adds material from the 20th-century editions of Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa critical editions. AP's distinguishing methodological move is pedagogical re-organisation: where MW is alphabetical by Sanskrit headword, AP groups syntactically and provides example-rich glosses aimed at the student of Sanskrit literature, not the comparative philologist. AP has no direct successor in CDSL but is the de facto English-Sanskrit reference for active reading in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Full lineage in AP/DICT_PROFILE.md.

6. Cross-references — divergence/convergence with adjacent chapters

7. Decisions log

• 5-type profile (PWG-like) per same reason: AP lacks <info>, <bot>, <bio>, <lang> so encyclopedic / IE / verbal-lemma primary types from MW's refactored typology cannot be detected.
• The single <ls>L.</ls> instance is documented as an anomaly (post-MW inheritance) rather than a systematic Apte convention.
• 15.2-pt spread is the highest in CDSL — surfaced as a pedagogical feature (indeclinables most-cited, content-nouns least-cited).
• Effect-size threshold (D19): all numerical claims on this page exceed |Δ| ≥ 5 pt threshold.

8. Data dictionary + reproducibility manifest

• DATA_DICTIONARY.md — full tag inventory
• Source file: csl-orig/v02/ap90/ap90.txt
• Block-detector script: figures/scripts/export_data.py
• Cross-dict aggregate JSON: src/data/cross-dict.json (includes AP/AP90 block matrix data)
• License: CC-BY-SA-4.0

See also (tools)

• Cross-dictionary comparison
• AP90#31 — docs-pass tracking issue

Source: CDSL ap90.txt 2026-05-23 · MWS docs-pass commit reflects audit pipeline as of 2026-05-27 · CC-BY-SA-4.0