Aufrecht, Catalogus Catalogorum (ACC)
ACC is Theodor Aufrecht's Catalogus Catalogorum — not a word dictionary but the great
bibliographical catalogue of Sanskrit works and authors, indexing titles and names against
the manuscript catalogues in which they appear. A finding-aid for Sanskrit literature: the
title means a catalogue of catalogues, and expresses, in Aufrecht's own words, "the sources
from which the present work is" compiled.
It is among the largest datasets on CDSL — just under 50,000 entries — and one of the most independent: 43.3 % of its headwords occur in no other digitized dictionary here, the natural result of indexing work-titles, commentators, and library collections rather than vocabulary.
At a glance
| Code | ACC (GitHub repo ACC) |
| Full title | Catalogus Catalogorum |
| Author | Theodor Aufrecht |
| Size | ~1216 pages · ~49,800 entries |
| Edition | Parts I–II Leipzig 1891 & 1896 (F. A. Brockhaus); Part III 1903; reprinted 1962 |
| Type | Bibliographical catalogue (works & authors) |
| Source | csl-orig/v02/acc/ |
| Open | Basic · List · Advanced · Mobile |
| Data | Downloads |
| csl-doc | acc.rst |
When to use it
Reach for ACC to find where a Sanskrit work or author is catalogued — its subject field
and the manuscript catalogues that record it. Concretely:
- Identify a work behind a title met in a colophon or citation — its subject, its commentator, where manuscripts are listed.
- Trace a commentator or author across the literature that carries their name.
- Locate manuscript holdings as they stood in the printed catalogues of Aufrecht's day.
It indexes literature, not vocabulary; for word meanings use Monier-Williams (MW).
Reading an entry
Each entry is a title or author (<k1>) with a subject tag and abbreviated catalogue
references. The first entry (csl-orig/v02/acc/acc.txt):
<L>1<pc>1-001,1<k1>aMSadaSA<k2>aMSadaSA
{#aMSadaSA#}¦ jy. Rice 28.
An author entry looks different again (csl-orig/v02/acc/acc.txt, entry 1925):
<L>1925<pc>1-048,1<k1>AnandarAya<k2>AnandarAya
{#AnandarAya#}¦ patron of Samaraja (Damacarita). Oxf. 138^b.
| In the source | Meaning |
|---|---|
<pc>1-048,1 | page-column reference (volume 1, p. 48, col. 1) |
{#aMSadaSA#} | the work title Aṃśadaśā (search key <k1>, SLP1 in bold {#…#}) |
jy. | subject abbreviation — jyotiṣa (astronomy/astrology) |
Rice 28 / Oxf. 138^b | the catalogue reference — which printed catalogue lists it, at what page or folio (^b = the second side of folio 138) |
patron of Samaraja (Damacarita) | for authors: the relationship that identifies them |
See Data Formats for the markup reference.
The two abbreviation systems
Every entry compresses two facts into sigla, both keyed in the work's own front matter — which survives on CDSL as a fully transcribed digitized preface, unlike most scan-only front matter here.
Subject tags are Aufrecht's terse field markers. His preface names them directly:
"an. anonymous, dh. dharma, fr. fragmentary, gr. grammatical, ny. nyaya,
tantr. tantric", alongside jy. (jyotiṣa) and others. Counted across the whole file, the
most common are dh. (dharma, ~1,950 entries), jy. (~1,580), ny. (~940), and gr. (~540)
— a fair map of what nineteenth-century libraries collected.
Catalogue references point into the printed manuscript catalogues the entries were
harvested from. From the same preface: Oxf. is the Bodleian catalogue Aufrecht himself wrote
(1864); Cambr. his Trinity College Cambridge catalogue (1869); IO. the India Office
collections (Colebrooke, Wilkins, Burnell and others, catalogued by Eggeling); W. Weber's
Berlin Verzeichniss (1853); L. Rajendralala Mitra's Notices of Sanskrit MSS. — plus
dozens of regional lists (a typical entry cites Rice 28). When you expand a reference like
Oxf. 138^b you get a shelf, not a definition: ACC tells you where manuscripts were, and
the reader follows from there.
How the file is organized
The three parts were each alphabetized separately — the digitized user notes are explicit that "the entries in each volume are separately alphabetized" — so the digital text runs through the alphabet once per volume-part. The file also preserves the catalogue's internal structure as section headings: clusters of related works sit under head-texts ("Commentaries on the Tarkasaṃgraha", commentaries grouped two-by-two under their base works) and under named anthology-collections (treatises "mostly extracted from the Gadādharī", tracts from the Jagadīśī). Searching a base text's name can therefore surface a whole family of commentary entries that no single alphabetical position would reveal.
Search tips
- Titles, not meanings. Search the Sanskrit title in SLP1 transliteration; there is no English gloss to search for.
- Mind the per-volume alphabets. A title has up to three separate positions (Parts I, II, III); check all runs before concluding absence.
- Search commentators by name. Author entries carry relationships ("patron of…", "commentator on…") that identify minor figures nowhere else.
- Follow section headers. Commentary families cluster under their base work's heading.
What makes it distinctive
- A catalogue of catalogues. The standard index of Sanskrit works and authors.
- Bibliographical, not lexical — it points to manuscripts and catalogues.
- Fully transcribed front matter — the preface with both abbreviation keys is searchable text on CDSL.
- Highly independent headword stock — 43.3 % unique share per the site's atlas measurements, see Guides Hypotheses.
Headword key conventions
<k1> = <k2> = SLP1 (Sanskrit title or author name as the search key). ACC is a bibliographic catalogue, not a word dictionary — entries identify works and their locations in manuscript catalogues.
| Convention | Marker / form | Example | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search key | SLP1 (title / name) | aMSadaSA | Type the Sanskrit title or author name in SLP1 |
| Title form | SLP1 bold {#…#} | {#aMSadaSA#} | The printed title |
| Subject code | Short abbreviation after headword | jy. = jyotiṣa (astrology) | Subject field of the work |
| Catalogue reference | Catalogue name + page/folio | Rice 28, Oxf. 138^b | The manuscript catalogue that records the work |
| No English gloss | No definition | — | ACC gives location information, not meaning |
Abbreviations
No machine-readable abbreviation list yet; the legend lives in the scanned front matter. View front matter →
See also
- Monier-Williams (MW) — for the meanings of words
- The full catalog of all 43 dictionaries
- csl-doc acc.rst