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How to read a Sanskrit dictionary entry

A Sanskrit dictionary entry looks dense at first — a headword, then a run of abbreviations, italics, bracketed roots and clipped source names with no sentences to hold onto. But every entry is built from the same handful of structural parts, laid out in the same order. Once you can name those parts, any entry — in any of the 44 dictionaries on the site — becomes readable.

Below, four real entries are dissected: one from each of the flagship dictionaries. Every structural part is tinted and labelled; hover a coloured span to see what it is, and read the legend beneath the cards.

काल kāla1 mf(I, Pāṇ. iv, 1, 42)n. (fr. √ 3. kal?), black, of a dark colour, dark-blue, MBh.; R. &c.
Monier-Williams (1899) · L49019 · p. 277,1
गज gaja m. 1) ElephantAK. 2,8,2,2. H. 1217. MED. j. 7. ADBH. BR.inInd. St. 1,39. M. 8,296. 11,136. VIŚV. 4,12. …
Böhtlingk & Roth, Petersburger Wörterbuch (1855–75) · L21371 · p. 2-0630 · opening lines
काण kāṇa a. [ kaṇ nimīlane kartari ghañ Tv. ] 1 One-eyed; akṣṇā kāṇaḥ Sk; kāṇena cakṣuṣā kiṃ vāH. Pr. 12; Ms. 3. 155.2 Perforated, broken (as a cowrie); prāptaḥ kāṇavarāṭakopi na mayā tṛṣṇe'dhunā muṃca māmBh. 3. 4; (Mar.phuṭakī kavaḍī). …
Apte, Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1890) · L10654 · p. 0392-b · opening lines
इध्म idhma m., Brennholz [von idh], vgl. suidhmá. -ás 665,2; 916,6. -ám 94,4; 298,6; 308,2; 887,9. -éna 252,3.
Grassmann, Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda (1873) · L1702 · p. 0211
Headword / lemmaDevanāgarī + IAST + source key — the entry's address
Homonym indexdistinguishes identically-spelt but distinct headwords
Grammar taggender / part-of-speech (m., mfn., n., ind., a.)
Etymologyroot / derivation / compound analysis
Sanskrit formcited Sanskrit words & inflected forms
Sense markernumbered sense divisions
Gloss / definitionthe translational meaning
Source citationattesting work abbreviations (RV., MBh., VS. …)
Attested forminflected forms with corpus loci (Grassmann)
Abbreviationscholarly abbreviation

The parts, one by one​

Headword / lemma​

The headword (or lemma) is the entry's address — the dictionary form of the word you looked up. On this site it is shown in Devanāgarī and IAST (the italic roman transliteration), e.g. काल · kāla. Internally the Cologne data keys each entry by an accent-stripped SLP1 search key (kAla); see Encoding & Transliteration for how the input scripts map to one another.

Homonym index​

When two genuinely different words are spelt the same, each gets its own entry, distinguished by a small superscript number — काल¹ "time / black" versus a separate काल for a different sense-cluster. The index is how the dictionary keeps identical spellings apart; always check which numbered headword you are actually reading.

Grammar tag​

Right after the headword comes the grammar tag — gender and part of speech: m. (masculine), f. (feminine), n. (neuter), mf(ī)n. (an adjective with its feminine in -ī), a. (adjective), ind. (indeclinable). In Monier-Williams this can carry an inline grammatical citation to Pāṇini's grammar.

Etymology​

Many entries open the body with a derivation — the root the word comes from, a compound analysis, or a Uṇādi-sūtra reference. Monier-Williams marks it with fr. ("from") and the root sign √; Apte encloses it in square brackets ([ kaṇ … ghañ ]); Böhtlingk-Roth writes von ("from"). This is the part that tells you why the word means what it means.

Sense markers​

Longer entries split the meaning into numbered senses — ①, ②, ③ … Apte and Böhtlingk-Roth number their senses explicitly; Monier-Williams tends to run them together with semicolons. Read the sense numbers as the branches of the word's meaning.

Gloss / definition​

The gloss is the translational meaning itself — "fire", "an elephant", "heavy, weighty". In Monier-Williams and Apte it is English; in Böhtlingk-Roth and Grassmann it is German (Feuer, Elephant, Brennholz). It is the plain, un-tinted text between the marked-up parts.

Source citations​

The clipped capitalised abbreviations — RV., MBh., R., AK., Ms. — are source citations: the classical texts that attest the word in that sense, often with a precise book/verse locus (RV. 1,12,6). They are the evidence behind the definition. The full key to these abbreviations lives on the Abbreviations & citations page, and you can see which texts each dictionary quotes most.

Cross-references​

Pointers to related headwords — cf. / q.v. (Monier-Williams, Apte), Vgl. / s. (Böhtlingk-Roth, Grassmann) — send you to a synonym, a variant, or a fuller treatment elsewhere. Follow them; Sanskrit lexicography is a web, not a list.

Attested forms (Grassmann)​

Grassmann's Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda is a concordance as much as a dictionary: under a headword it lists the actual inflected forms as they occur in the Ṛg-Veda, each with its locus — इध्म idhma "firewood" appears as -ás at 665,2 and 916,6, -ám at 94,4, and so on. No other CDSL dictionary records forms and loci this exhaustively.

The same word, four different entries​

The cards above deliberately use different headwords so each shows off its dictionary's character, but the deeper lesson is that the same word is structured differently by each editor. Monier-Williams is broad and English-facing; Apte (AP90) numbers its senses cleanly and quotes literary examples; Böhtlingk-Roth (PWG) is the deepest scholarly treatment, in German, with the fullest citations; Grassmann (GRA) is Vedic-only and form-by-form. Choosing the right dictionary for your word is half the skill — the dictionary landscape and the which-dictionary guide help you pick.

Where to go next​

The coloured dissections on this page are generated from the CDSL digitized-text markup by the reusable entry-anatomy tool — the parts are read straight off the source tags, not guessed from print. Nested markup is flattened into its outer part, so the diagram is a teaching aid, not a formal parser.