Dictionary Lookup Types

We added Sanskrit and Pali search functionality to our Dictionary, and together with the existing Lemma and Form searches we now offer four different ways to look up articles:

  • Prefixing L: to the search string or choosing ‘Lemma’ in the drop‐down menu to the right of the search box will search article headwords in their normalized spelling.
  • Prefixing F: or choosing ‘Form’ will search for word forms as they are actually spelled in source documents.
  • Prefixing S: or choosing ‘Sanskrit’ will search Sanskrit words cited in the etymology sections of articles.
  • Prefixing P: or choosing ‘Pali’ will search Pali words cited in the etymology sections of articles.

The Sanskrit and Pali lookups may still return a small number of false positives, but we hope their usefulness far outweighs this inconvenience as we continue to improve them. Any of the four lookup types understands the regular‐expression syntax described in the Preface so that the search string

S:.*r(ś|ṣ|s).*

for instance will return all those lexemes whose etymologies involve Sanskrit words containing r followed by a sibilant.