Macdonell Practical Sanskrit

Macdonell Practical Sanskrit Dictionary app is a fulltext searchable version of Arthur Anthony Macdonell's "A practical Sanskrit dictionary with transliteration, accentuation, and etymological analysis throughout" (London: Oxford University Press, 1929). The data conversion and presentation of this dictionary was sponsored by Columbia University with support from the former Columbia-Dharam Hinduja Center for Indic Research. It is a product of the Digital South Asia Library program (http://dsal.uchicago.edu) at the University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu).

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 Android device upon first download.

By default, the app operates in the online mode.

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. For example, headword searches for कराग्र, "kara̮agra," or "karagra" will all yield a definition about "tip of finger."

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.

For fulltext searching, select the "Search all text" check box in the overflow menu (usually the three vertical dots icon at the top right corner of the screen), then enter the search term in the search box at the top.

Fulltext searching supports multiword searching. 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 list item.

The full result page presents definitions in a format that allows the user to select terms to copy and paste for further dictionary searching or for conducting a web search on the term (given an internet connection). 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.

Selecting Online/Offline Mode

To select either online or offline mode, simply check or uncheck the "Search offline" box in the overflow menu. When in online mode, the world icon at the top of the screen will appear dark; in offline mode, it will appear light.

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.