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Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries

The Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries (CDSL) is a freely available collection of 42 Sanskrit dictionaries published between 1832 and 1993, digitized and served at sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de (version 2.10.0). Each dictionary is fully searchable, cross-linked, downloadable, and available alongside the original scanned pages.

What CDSL provides​

  • 42 dictionaries across Sanskrit→English, English→Sanskrit, Sanskrit→French, Sanskrit→German, Sanskrit→Latin, Sanskrit→Sanskrit, and specialized indices (Mahābhārata, Vedas, Purāṇas, Buddhist texts). See the catalog.
  • Four display modes per dictionary — Basic, List, Advanced, Mobile (the B L A M links on the front page). See Search & Display.
  • Multiple input/output transliterations — slp1, deva, roman, hk, itrans. See Encoding & Transliteration.
  • Downloads — XML (in SLP1), PDF, and the original scanned editions. See Downloads & Data.
  • Offline access via StarDict / Android. See Offline & StarDict.

How CDSL is built (in one paragraph)​

The dictionaries are maintained as plain-text source files in the sanskrit-lexicon GitHub organization. Source text is never edited in place by hand — corrections are expressed as change files applied by scripts, validated as XML, and committed with an audit trail. A generation pipeline turns the source into the XML, search indices, and web displays you see on the live site. The Developer Guide documents this end to end.

Related: csl-doc

These guides complement csl-doc, the project's Sphinx site of per-dictionary front matter, prefaces, and user notes. The catalog deep-links each dictionary to its csl-doc page. Use these guides for how-to and reference; use csl-doc for a specific dictionary's print front matter.

Provenance

This site was assembled and verified against the live website, the CDSL source repositories, and project documentation (the csl-newsletter log, readme_cologne.org, and the front page). The dictionary catalog is auto-generated from the live front page so it cannot drift. Known limitations are called out inline (e.g. the catalog's Still open items).