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CDSL Newsletter — June 2026

Dear Sanskrit scholars, students, and dictionary enthusiasts,

After a three-year hiatus, the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries newsletter is back — and this time it will reach you by email. If you are reading this on the web, you can subscribe here to receive future editions directly.

A great deal has happened over the past months, and there is much to share.

A new documentation site​

The project now has a comprehensive guides and documentation site at sanskrit-lexicon.github.io/csl-guides. It covers five areas:

  • Using the site — search, display options, encoding, and offline use
  • Dictionaries — deep-dive pages for all 43 dictionaries in the catalog, each with sample entries, abbreviation tables, and headword keying conventions
  • Tools — search guides and the new multi-dictionary comparison
  • Contributing — step-by-step correction workflow for scholars and editors
  • Developers — architecture, repository structure, and API reference

Compare dictionaries side by side​

The Multi-Dictionary tool lets you look up one Sanskrit word across Monier-Williams, Apte, Böhtlingk-Roth, and Grassmann simultaneously, with live entries fetched from the CDSL API. Each column resolves the headword per dictionary — useful for seeing how the same lemma is treated across scholarly traditions.

Reading Monier-Williams — a step-by-step guide​

A new guide to reading MW covers its four layers of alphabetical order, symbols, and how to trace a word to its dhātu. Sixty-nine self-check questions each link to a live CDSL entry, so every quiz doubles as a cross-check between the print edition and the digital text.

Abbreviations standardized across all 43 dictionaries​

Each dictionary deep page now embeds a full abbreviation table sourced directly from the authoritative abbreviation lists for that dictionary. A new cross-dictionary comparison puts all abbreviations side by side, making it easy to spot clashes and shared conventions across the catalog.

Headword keying conventions documented​

Each dictionary page now includes a section on headword keying — how the search key used in the digital record relates to the form printed in the dictionary. This matters particularly when using the API or working with raw data files.

Prefaces for Grassmann and Macdonell​

The OCR prefaces page now includes the Grassmann (Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda) and Macdonell (A Practical Sanskrit Dictionary) prefaces, bringing the total to seven dictionaries with full preface text accessible online.

Corrections, feedback, and contributions are always welcome through the GitHub repository.

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