Where MW's Supplement Came From
Monier-Williams' 1899 dictionary carries a supplement — the "annexure", entries tagged
<info n="sup"/> in the Cologne digitization of mw. Where did those
entries come from? The obvious candidate is Böhtlingk's Nachträge und Verbesserungen (the
supplement sections of the great Petersburg dictionary, PW 1855–1875, digitized
separately as pwkvn and tagged sup_1…sup_7 inside pw.txt).
That question is measurable rather than rhetorical, because the sources carry dates and the Cologne digitizations are queryable.
The enrichment metric
Take a headword set S. Compare its share among MW99's annexure entries with its share among MW99's main entries:
enrichment(S) = [ |S ∩ annexure| / |annexure| ] ÷ [ |S ∩ main| / |main| ]
A ratio ≫ 1 means the supplement is disproportionately stocked from S.
| source set S | n(S) | share in annexure | share in main | enrichment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
PW Nachträge, sup_7 (letzte Nachträge) | 13,094 | 29.6 % | 3.8 % | 7.79× |
PW Nachträge, all layers sup_1…sup_7 | 14,401 | 32.2 % | 4.1 % | 7.91× |
pwkvn standalone Nachträge digitization | 14,995 | 32.5 % | 4.1 % | 7.84× |
| Edgerton, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary (1953) | 17,777 | 6.8 % | 3.3 % | 2.09× |
Convention: k1-only headwords; MW99 annexure = 6,067 k1, main = 188,016 k1.
Reading. The 1899 annexure is ~7.8× enriched for PW-Nachträge vocabulary and only ~2.1× enriched for Edgerton's BHS vocabulary — i.e. it is about 3.7× more "PW-flavoured" than "BHS-flavoured". Edgerton (1953) post-dates MW99 by 54 years, so its low enrichment is expected; the PW layers pre-date MW99 and their enrichment is high. The asymmetry is the quantitative form of the long-standing suggestion that MW's supplement was built on the Nachträge.
The dates are the argument
| source | year | relation to MW99 (1899) |
|---|---|---|
| Böhtlingk–Roth, Sanskrit-Wörterbuch (PW), vols 1–7 + Nachträge | 1855–1875 | pre-dates — available to MW |
| Böhtlingk, kürzere Fassung | 1879–1889 | pre-dates — available to MW |
| Monier-Williams, MW72 | 1872 | earlier edition, no annexure |
| Monier-Williams, MW99 | 1899 | the dictionary with the annexure |
| Edgerton, BHS Dictionary | 1953 | post-dates — not available to MW |
Because every Nachträge layer post-dates MW72 and pre-dates MW99, a Nachträge word present
in MW99 but absent from MW72 could only have been taken from the Nachträge. Of the
13,094 unique sup_7 headwords, 4,112 appear in no MW edition at all, 27 were dropped
between the editions, and MW99 took 6,090 (≈60 %) of the pool MW72 lacked — 1,474 of
them through the annexure.
A worked example
kāritra (abstract noun "activity", = ceṣṭita) is absent from mw.txt entirely and
from MW72 (1872), while it stands in the Nachträge at PW 7-331-d (pw L216013,
pwkvn L16013), citing Mahāvyutpatti 245, 844 (ed. 1849) and glossed by Edgerton's
BHS as a Buddhist-Hybrid term. kārāpaka, its alphabetical neighbour, did enter the MW99
annexure — the shape of a supplement that was compiled from the Nachträge and skipped some
of its entries.
Caveats
- The metric ranks provenance likelihood, not citation: set overlaps do not prove that a
given annexure entry was copied from a given Nachträge page. The reverse share — ~30 % of
annexure headwords are verbatim
sup_7entries — is the direct check. - The candidate lists are a worklist, not verdicts: every proposed addition needs printed-scan verification before filing.
- Near-form string matches are review flags, not matches (
kāritrafuzzy-hitskāritaat 0.92 — a different word).
Reproduce / read more
Full study (methods, tables, DCS-ranked samples, adjudication workbook): MW-vs-Nachträge trial · independent recheck · uptake & provenance details · adjudication workbook · proposal list. Discussion: csl-corrections#119.