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Apte, The Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary — revised & enlarged (AP)

AP is the Revised and Enlarged edition of Vaman Shivram Apte's Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary — the larger, later successor to AP90 (the 1890 first edition). Prepared after Apte's death by P. K. Gode and C. G. Karve and published 1957–1959, it runs to ~1768 pages (against AP90's 1196) and is prized for its finely divided, numbered senses and abundant quotations with sources. Glosses are in English; the direction is Sanskrit → English.

At a glance​

CodeAP (GitHub repo AP)
Full titleThe Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary (revised & enlarged edition)
Author / editorsVaman Shivram Apte; revised & enlarged by P. K. Gode and C. G. Karve
Year / size1957–1959 · ~1768 pages
DirectionSanskrit → English
AccentsNo
Sourcecsl-orig/v02/ap/
OpenBasic · List · Advanced · Mobile
DataDownloads
csl-docap.rst (front matter / preface)
Which Apte? Three are in the catalog

AP (this page) — the 1957–1959 revised & enlarged Sanskrit→English edition. AP90 — the 1890 first edition, smaller. AE (repo ApteES) — Apte's English→Sanskrit Student's dictionary, the reverse direction. For reading Sanskrit, AP is the fullest Apte; reach for AP90 for the leaner classic and AE to compose Sanskrit.

When to use it​

Reach for AP when you want Apte's coverage at its fullest — the revised edition adds material throughout and divides meanings into many clearly numbered senses, each typically backed by a quotation. It complements:

  • Monier-Williams (MW) — broader and more encyclopaedic, and it marks Vedic accents.
  • AP90 — the leaner 1890 edition; use it when you want the classic, or to compare the two Apte recensions.
  • Böhtlingk-Roth (PWG) — the deepest scholarly treatment, in German.

Looking up a word​

Open the Basic display, choose your input/output transliteration (see Encoding & Transliteration), and type the headword. The List and Advanced displays browse the headword index and search inside entries — see Search & Display.

Reading an entry​

Apte sets Sanskrit in {#…#} (SLP1), italic in {%…%}, bold in {@…@}, and tags literary sources with <ls>. The hallmark of the revised edition is the ∙² sense markers, which number the senses within an entry. The entry aṃśumat "radiant; (m.) the sun" (csl-orig/v02/ap/ap.txt):

<L>13<pc>0002-1<k1>aMSumat<k2>aMSumat<e>1
{#aMSumat#}¦ {%<lex>a.</lex>%} [{#aMSu-astyarTe matup#}]
∙²1 Luminous, radiant; {#jyotizAM raviraMSumAn#} <ls>Bg. 10. 21</ls>.
∙²2 Pointed.
∙²3 Fibrous, abounding in filaments (<ab>Ved.</ab>) {%<lex>m.</lex>%}
In the sourceMeaning
<pc>0002-1page-column reference (p. 2, col. 1 — AP numbers columns 1/2/3)
{#aMSumat#}headword / Sanskrit, in SLP1
{%<lex>a.</lex>%}the grammatical label (adjective), italicised
[{#aMSu-astyarTe matup#}]the etymology / derivation, in Sanskrit
∙²1, ∙²2, ∙²3the entry's numbered senses (1, 2, 3 …)
<ls>Bg. 10. 21</ls>a literary-source citation (Bhagavad-gītā 10.21), the link target
{%<lex>m.</lex>%}a part-of-speech shift within a sense (here to masculine — the sun)

See Data Formats for the full markup reference.

What makes it distinctive​

  • The fullest Apte. The 1957–1959 revision enlarges the 1890 text by roughly half again (≈1768 vs 1196 pages).
  • Finely numbered senses. The ∙² markers split each entry into many discrete, numbered meanings — easier to cite a precise sense than in the older edition.
  • Quotation-rich. Senses are routinely anchored to a sourced quotation (<ls>).
  • Two Apte recensions, side by side. Because both AP and AP90 are digitized, you can compare how a word was treated in 1890 and in the revised edition.

See also​