Geshe Chodrak Dictionary vs DDSA Practical Sanskrit

Geshe Chodrak’s dictionary is one of very few native Tibetan-Tibetan dictionaries written; it is also the least influenced by Chinese thought and needs. It features short but precise definitions and includes obscure terms not found elsewhere, making it extremely useful to students of the language at all levels. There have not been many native Tibetan dictionaries. The few that were made in earlier times were almost unusable because they were written in a style that did not allow for easy look-up of terms. In the 20th century, three dictionaries were made that were, for the first time, usable as dictionaries. The first was made in Lhasa in the 1940’s prior to the Communist takeover. It was the dictionary presented here, made by Geshe Chodrak with the assistance of the remarkably erudite and modern scholar, Gendun Chophel. The two other major dictionaries were made in the 1970’s and 1980’s after the Communist takeover; they are the dag yig gsar sgrigs New Style of Compilation Pure Letters and the bod rgya tshig mdzod chen mo The Great Chinese-Tibetan Dictionary. All three dictionaries are useful. However, the two later dictionaries have both been considerably influenced by Chinese thought and needs, often in a way detrimental to the contents of the dictionary. Geshe Chodrak’s dictionary on the other hand has was written in a purely Tibetan situation without another culture overseeing the work and insisting on changes that suited its own needs.

The Macdonell Practical Sanskrit Dictionary app is a product of the Digital South Asia Library program (https://dsal.uchicago.edu) at the University of Chicago. The app offers a searchable version of Macdonell, Arthur Anthony, "A practical Sanskrit dictionary with transliteration, accentuation, and etymological analysis throughout," London: Oxford University Press, 1929. "The original edition of this dictionary was published by Messrs. Longmans, Green & co., and has been reproduced photographically with their consent." The Macdonell Practical Sanskrit Dictionary app can be used both online and offline. The online version interacts with a database that runs remotely on a server at the University of Chicago. The offline version uses a database that is created on the device upon first download. By default, the app operates in the online mode. The app allows users to conduct both headword and fulltext queries. The default mode for this app is to search headwords. To search for a headword, touch the search box at the top (magnifying glass icon) to expose the on-screen keyboard and begin searching. Headwords can be entered in Sanskrit, accented latin characters, and unaccented latin characters. After entering three characters in the search box, a scrollable list of search suggestions will pop up. Touch the word to search for and it will automatically fill in the search field. Or ignore suggestions and enter the search term completely. To execute the search, touch the return button on the keyboard. By default, headword searches expand off the end of the search term. In other words, searching for "kar" will generate results for headwords that begin with "kar" and have any number of trailing characters, like "karanda" (करण्ड), "karaṅka" (करङ्क), "karîra" (करीर), etc. To expand the front of a query, users can enter the "%" character at the beginning of search term. For example, "%kar" will find "á-karna" (अकर्ण), "a-kâraka" (अकारक), "agni-kârya" (अग्निकार्य), etc. The wildcard character at the front of a word also expands search suggestions. For fulltext searching, select the "Fulltext" search scope button and then enter the search term in the search box at the top. For example, the search "temple fire" returns 4 results where "temple" and "fire" can be found in the same definition. Multiword searches can be executed with the boolean operators "NOT" and "OR" as well. The search "temple OR fire" returns 319 fulltext results; "temple NOT fire" returns 93 fulltext results. To conduct substring matching, select an option from the "Search Options" sub-menu, enter a string in the search field, and touch return. The default for all searching is "Words beginning with." But for example, selecting "Words ending with," "Search all text," and then entering "sant" as the search string will find 96 examples of words that end in "sant." Search results come first in a numbered list that displays the Sanskrit headword, the accented latin transliteration of the headword, and a chunk of the definition. To see a full definition, touch the headword. In online mode, the full result page also has a page number link that the user can click to get the full page context of the definition. Link arrows at the top of the full page allow the user to click to previous and next pages in the dictionary. To select either online or offline mode, simply toggle the selector at the top of the screen. Note that on start up, the app will test to see whether the device has an internet connection and the remote server is available. Again, the app operates in online mode by default. The user should select the appropriate mode before conducting a search.