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Monier-Williams Sanskrit–English Dictionary (MW)

Monier Monier-Williams' Sanskrit–English Dictionary (1899) is the standard general reference for classical Sanskrit and the most-used dictionary on the site. This is a flagship guide page — for most other dictionaries the catalog links straight to their csl-doc front-matter page.

At a glance​

CodeMW (GitHub repo MWS)
Full titleA Sanskrit–English Dictionary (new ed., greatly enlarged)
AuthorMonier Monier-Williams; digital edition with Ernst Leumann and Carl Cappeller
Year / size1899 · ~1333 pages
DirectionSanskrit → English
AccentsYes (Vedic accents are marked)
Sourcecsl-orig/v02/mw/
OpenBasic · List · Advanced · Mobile
DataDownloads · Scans (PDF)
csl-docmw.rst (front matter / preface)

When to use it​

Reach for MW when you want the broadest classical coverage in English: it is encyclopaedic, rich in compounds, etymologies, and literary-source citations, and it marks Vedic accents. Complements within CDSL:

  • Use Apte (AP90) for a cleaner, sense-numbered classical reading and idioms.
  • Use Böhtlingk-Roth (PWG) (German) for the deepest scholarly treatment and the fullest citations.
  • Use Grassmann (GRA) for the Ṛg-Veda specifically.
  • For the 1872 first edition, see MW72 (a separate dictionary, not the same text).

Looking up a word​

  1. Open the Basic display and pick your input transliteration (see Encoding & Transliteration — MW defaults to Kyoto-Harvard).
  2. Type the headword and choose an output script (e.g. Roman Unicode or Devanāgarī). Type agni (fire):
MW Basic display showing the entry for agni: citation box, input Kyoto-Harvard, output Roman Unicode, and the rendered entry

For browsing neighbours, the List display shows a Devanāgarī headword index beside the entry; the Advanced display searches inside entries. See Search & Display for all four modes.

Reading an entry​

The agni entry above illustrates the structure every MW entry shares:

In the displayMeaningSource markup
(H1)record / homonym group<L>…<LEND> record, <h> homonym
[Printed book page 5,1]page,column in the 1899 print<pc>1,1
agni (headword)the lemma, keyed in SLP1<k1>agni</k1>, <k2> for hyphenation
m.gender / lexical category<lex>m.</lex>, <info lex="m"/>
(√ag, Uṇ.)etymology / grammatical authority<s> Sanskrit spans, <ab> abbreviations
Gārhapatya, …Sanskrit terms rendered to your output script<s>, <s1>
[ID=890]stable per-sense id (used by permalinks/API)record lnum
coloured source abbreviationsliterary-source citations, click-through to scans where linked<ls>

See Data Formats for the full markup reference.

What makes MW distinctive​

  • Vedic accents. MW marks accents; they can be shown or hidden via the accent option (and the API accent parameter).
  • Digital additions. The XML edition incorporates material from Ernst Leumann and Carl Cappeller.
  • Pāṇinian links. References to Pāṇini's grammar in MW were linked (October 2021), so grammatical citations click through to their targets — part of the "Dictionary to Book" effort (Issue Taxonomy).
  • Inflected forms. A companion MW inflected-forms resource maps inflected words back to MW headwords — handy when you meet a declined/conjugated form. See Tools → Multi-Dictionary (/scans/csl-inflect/web/index.php).

Worked examples​

Find a compound — in Advanced, set field Sanskrit word → Text Word won't help for a stem; use query_type=wildcard on headword_slp1 (e.g. agni*) to list compounds beginning agni-. See Advanced Search.

Search by cited source — to find entries citing a given text, search the entry body (field=xml or sense) for the source's abbreviation in Advanced.

Fetch an entry programmatically — the native API serves MW entries; e.g. getword returns the entry-display for a headword. See the API page for the base URL, parameters, and the (C-SALT-compatible) Salt API.

Link straight to an entry — the clean-URL permalink form is /MW/{ref} where ref is a headword in any input transliteration or an lnum — e.g. /MW/bAQa or /MW/144239 (roadmap; see API → Clean-URL permalinks).

How MW was digitized​

The digitization is documented in "Marking Monier" (Jim Funderburk & Thomas Malten, Second International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium, 2008). It describes four phases — initial digitization, refinement into MONIER.ALL, conversion to XML, and the current mwtab markup — and the choices made to preserve the print structure without losing information. See Publications and the live "Marking Monier" notes.

See also​