Origins

The site you are reading is the visible tip of a thirty-year effort that grew from two roots that eventually merged:

• a Cologne lineage — the digitization and markup of the great 19th-century Sanskrit dictionaries at the Institut für Indologie und Tamilistik (IITS), University of Cologne, driven by Thomas Malten and colleagues; and
• a Sanskrit Library lineage — Peter Scharf and Malcolm Hyman's work in the United States on integrated, computable Sanskrit text and lexical resources.

These were never wholly separate — Cologne supplied the dictionary data the Sanskrit Library integrated, and the same people (Malten, Scharf, Jim Funderburk) recur across both — but they began as distinct projects with their own funding and goals. The single timeline below braids them together up to the present site.

This page is the long-form origin story. For the project's own dated version log of recent releases, see the History timeline; for the publications it rests on, see Publications & Bibliography.

Two pages that bracket the early web era

The two oldest surfaces of this history are still reachable:

• The Cologne anchor — the "Sanskrit and Tamil Dictionaries" search. The page at sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/MWScan/tamil/ is a first-generation Cologne web display: a single interface searching across Monier-Williams, Capeller's Sanskrit–English, the Cologne Online Tamil Lexicon, and a Concise Pahlavi dictionary (~321,620 entries). It was built c. 2003 by Thomas Malten (who supplied the digitized dictionaries) and Kira Stöwe (who programmed the display). It is now preserved and maintained as the GitHub repo sanskrit-lexicon/Cologne-Sanskrit-Tamil — explicitly "a web-frontend port of the Cologne MWScan 'tamil' multi-dictionary search."
• The Sanskrit Library anchor — the development history. The page at sanskritlibrary.org/development2.html records the Sanskrit Library's own 2001–2013 development, from Whitney's Roots through the NSF integration project that formally tied it to Cologne.

A single merged timeline

When	Cologne / CDSL	Sanskrit Library / computational track
1994	The Sanskrit lexicons begin to be prepared at the IITS, University of Cologne — the start of the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon (CDSL).
1997	Kapp & Malten, Report on the Cologne Sanskrit Dictionary Project, describes the plan to digitize and merge the major 19th-century bilingual Sanskrit dictionaries without altering their structure.
2001–02		The Sanskrit Library is founded as a Rhode Island non-profit (4 November 2002); Peter Scharf and Malcolm Hyman begin building computable Sanskrit resources.
2003	The "Sanskrit and Tamil Dictionaries" web search (MWScan/tamil) goes online — Malten (data) + Kira Stöwe (display).	Scharf & Hyman produce a digital edition of Whitney's The Roots, Verb-Forms and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language and inflection software (a $4,607 Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning grant, 2003–04).
2006–2009	Cologne (Malten) is a core data partner.	The NSF-funded International Digital Sanskrit Library Integration project runs at Brown University ($247,350), led by Scharf with Jost Gippert (TITUS, Frankfurt) and Thomas Malten (CDSL, Cologne) — the formal convergence of the two lineages.
2007–2013		The International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposia series begins (1st: INRIA, Oct 2007, Gérard Huet; 2nd: May 2008; 3rd: Hyderabad, Jan 2009; 4th: JNU, Dec 2010; 5th: IIT Bombay, Jan 2013).
May 2008	Funderburk & Malten, "Marking Monier" — presented at the 2nd Symposium — walks through the four phases of digitizing and marking up the Monier-Williams dictionary.	The same symposium that hosts "Marking Monier."
2009		The Sanskrit Library's Vedic work helps extend the Unicode Standard (68 characters, Unicode 5.2).
2010		Peter Freund (Vedic Reserve) joins, contributing a large digital-text archive; the library reports ~300 digital texts, 131 online.
2010–2013	The DFG–NEH Project funds the digitization of many works — the dictionaries still marked with an asterisk (*) on the CDSL front page.
2013–2014	The current per-dictionary web display applications are generated (the "scan year" recorded for most dictionaries).
~2015	Jim Funderburk implements the present apidev API in PHP, the engine behind today's live lookups.
Sep 2021	The csl-newsletter daywise log begins; csl-devanagari is created for output closer to the printed text; the front page lists 38 dictionaries.
Dec 2023	Abhidhānacintāmaṇi of Hemacandra (ABCH) is added; CDSL version 2.5.0.
Now	Version 2.9.0; 42 fully digitized dictionaries (plus the PD sample), source in the v02 layout of csl-orig; see the catalog.	The Sanskrit Library continues its presentation of the Cologne dictionaries.

Where the two roots meet today

This documentation site, the live per-dictionary displays, the apidev API, and the side-by-side multi-dictionary comparison all sit on the Cologne data lineage; the Sanskrit Library lineage contributed the integration model, the computational-linguistics community (the Symposia), and people — Scharf, Funderburk, Malten — who worked across both. The Sanskrit Library's Cologne page remains a parallel presentation of the same underlying dictionaries.

Dating and verification

The two earliest entries are dated from the project's own standing statements rather than a single archival record: 1994 is the CDSL front page's own "prepared since 1994"; the 1997 Report and the c. 2003 date of the "Sanskrit and Tamil Dictionaries" search are approximate to the year. The Sanskrit Library dates and figures are quoted from development2.html and about.html. If you can supply a firmer source for any early date, please open an issue or PR.