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Sircar, Indian Epigraphical Glossary (IEG)

IEG is D. C. Sircar's Indian Epigraphical Glossary (1966) — a specialist glossary of the technical terms (administrative, fiscal, legal, social) that occur in Indian inscriptions, each defined and tied to the epigraphical corpus it comes from. Glosses are in English.

At a glance

CodeIEG (source in csl-orig/v02/ieg; no separate repo)
Full titleIndian Epigraphical Glossary
AuthorD. C. Sircar
Year / size1966 · ~580 pages
TypeGlossary of epigraphical terms (Sanskrit/Prakrit → English)
Sourcecsl-orig/v02/ieg/
OpenBasic · List · Advanced · Mobile
DataDownloads
csl-docieg.rst

When to use it

Reach for IEG when reading inscriptions and you meet an administrative, fiscal, or legal term that a literary dictionary won't gloss in its technical sense. For general meanings use Monier-Williams (MW).

Reading an entry

Each entry is a term (<k1>) with the inscription corpus it occurs in and an English gloss. The first entry (csl-orig/v02/ieg/ieg.txt):

<L>1<pc>001<k1>AbADa<k2>AbADa
{%ābādha%}¦ (CII 1), illness.
In the sourceMeaning
{%ābādha%}the term (search key <k1> is SLP1)
(CII 1)the source — Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, vol. 1
illnessthe English gloss

See Data Formats for the markup reference.

What makes it distinctive

  • Built for inscriptions. Administrative/technical senses, keyed to the epigraphical corpus.
  • The standard reference for epigraphical terminology (Sircar).

See also