Skip to main content

Search & Display Modes

Each dictionary offers four reading/search interfaces, shown as B L A M on the front page. They share the same underlying entries but differ in how you find and view them. The screenshots below are the Monier-Williams (MW) interfaces.

Basic display (B)​

Single-headword lookup with a clean reading view. Best when you already know the word. Input accepts multiple transliteration schemes (see Encoding & Transliteration); the entry is rendered with:

  • the headword,
  • the body text (definitions, glosses),
  • live cross-references where the markup supports them (literary-source citations, lexical and grammatical tags).
MW Basic display showing the entry for agni, with citation box, input Kyoto-Harvard, output Roman Unicode

List display (L)​

Browse headwords as a navigable list. Useful for:

  • confirming the exact spelling/sandhi of a headword,
  • scanning neighbours alphabetically,
  • jumping into the Basic view for any entry.

The two-pane layout shows the headword index on the left and the selected entry on the right; type a word in the box to populate both.

MW List display — two-pane browse interface with headword index and entry panes

Advanced search (A)​

Search within entry bodies, not just headwords. Typical capabilities:

  • full-text search across the entry body,
  • pattern/wildcard matching,
  • filtering by markup (e.g. entries citing a particular source).

The API exposes these match modes (query_type), which mirror what Advanced search can do: term, fuzzy, match, match_phrase, prefix, wildcard, regexp — and these searchable fields: headword_slp1, sense, re_headwords_slp1, xml, id. See the API page. The live Advanced URL is /scans/{CODE}Scan/2020/web/webtc2/index.php.

MW Advanced search form: Sanskrit word / Text Word fields, exact/match modes, output scheme, maximum results

Mobile display (M)​

A responsive layout of the same content for phones and tablets.

MW Mobile display showing the entry for agni in a phone-width layout

Entries are generated from XML markup. Tags that drive linking and display include (see Data Formats for the full list):

TagMeaning
<ls>Literary source / citation — often a click-through to scanned pages
<lex>Lexical/grammatical category
<ab>Abbreviation

When a <ls> reference has been linked (a "Dictionary to Book" task), clicking it opens the cited scanned page. See Contributing → Issue Taxonomy for how those links are built.

The same word across dictionaries​

Every dictionary shares the same lookup interface, so you can read one headword through several lenses. Here is agni ("fire") in the Basic display of three dictionaries — notice how the language, depth, and citation style differ:

Apte (AP90) — Sanskrit→English​

Apte (AP90) Basic display of agni — a concise Sanskrit-to-English entry

Böhtlingk-Roth (PWG) — Sanskrit→German​

Böhtlingk-Roth (PWG) Basic display of agni — a detailed Sanskrit-to-German entry

Grassmann (GRA) — Rig-Veda, Sanskrit→German​

Grassmann (GRA) Basic display of agni — the Rig-Veda vocabulary, Sanskrit to German

To pull a single word from many dictionaries at once instead of opening each separately, see the experimental Multi-Dictionary display.