Transliteration Technology

We use the user-friendly Transliteration Scheme developed by Google™ for providing Hindi transliteration on this site. The implementation uses the API provided by Google™ in conjunction with the awesome jQuery JavaScript library.

What is this site about

The word ‘Shabdkosh’ is the Romanized English spelling of the Hindi word for ‘Dictionary’. This website debuted in 2003 as an attempt to provide users with easy access to a English-Hindi dictionary. We remain committed to the goal of making it one of the finest reference sites for Indian languages.

Background and Motivation

The online English Hindi dictionary started as a small project with an aim to just make a website in Hindi. Dictionary was chosen as an application because there was no good quality online dictionary at the time and also because making a dictionary involves lot of challenge. The first version was a very simple site with about 15,000 words from the public domain dictionary compiled by Ram Narain Lal in 1936. Over time, the vocabulary was improvised and today it has tens of thousands of words. This site has grown in popularity because of its easy interface and strong vocabulary database. And we stay committed to improving it continuously.

Future Goals

Today, this online dictionary is one of the top sites for Indian language reference. However, we believe that there is a lot of potential for improvement. We hope that with the help of our knowledgeable users, we can make lot of improvement in the quality of this dictionary. So, we have developed an interface that allows interested users to contribute to the dictionary using an easy interface. It is our hope that with the help of knowledgeable individuals around the world, especially in India, this will become the richest English Hindi dictionary in the world. Depending on how good the collaborative efforts are, we also plan to start releasing the dictionary for download. That will let us give the results of collaborative efforts back to the user community and ultimately, help the users and learners of Hindi.

Site Redesign and Community Features

We have just completed re-designing this site. Here are some of the key changes:

 
• Redesign of the contribution interface
 
• Forums for help with translations and language learning
 
• Easier transliteration input for Hindi
 
• Regularly published Word of the Day column
 
• New content in the Quote of the Day column
 
• Better server for faster performance
 
• Updated member profile interface

Please tell us what you think. Your feedback is always appreciated!