Print Dictionaries

A number of English-Nepali, Nepali-English and Nepali-Nepali dictionaries are on the market, although most are available only in Nepal. Two of the most useful for beginners are Ratna's Nepali-English-Nepali Dictionary by Professor Babulall Pradhan (Ratna Pustak Bhandar, Kathmandu, 2001) and Ralph Lilley Turner's Nepali Dictionary (first published in 1931 by the Royal Asiatic Society, but still reprinted in India every couple of years). Prakash A. Raj has recently compiled a Nepali-English/English-Nepali dictionary and phrasebook which can be ordered from Amazon. Banu Oja, Shambhu Oja, Mark Turin and Elisabeth Uphoff's recently revised Nepali-English, English-Nepali Glossary can be ordered from Cornell by clicking here or viewed as an online database here.

Online Dictionaries

The Web is increasingly becoming a forum for the dissemination and sharing of Nepali language materials. Aside from Unicode tools which are compliant with most modern PCs and Macs running OS X, online resources require your computer to have one or more Nepali fonts installed, for which you should refer to our page on Nepali fonts. There are six online Nepali dictionaries: Banu Oja, Shambhu Oja, Mark Turin and Elisabeth Uphoff's Nepali-English/English-Nepali Glossary and Mark Turin's 1700-entry Unicode searchable Thangmi-Nepali-English Dictionary, both of which require a Windows PC to have the Kalimati Unicode font to view the Thangmi and Nepali (download Kalimati font). The font is NOT required for Apple Mac computers running OS X.2 or later. Bruce Adcock at Ohio State University has compiled a 420-word online Nepali dictionary and a verb conjugation chart, both of which are very easy to use. Nepal Homepage's dictionary requires installation of the Preeti font, which you can download from the THDL Nepali fonts page (note: you may need to increase the text size of your browser to read the Nepali script easily). The online dictionaries hosted by the Digital Dictionaries of Asia project of the Digital South Asia Library at the University of Chicago include online versions of Sir Ralph Lilley Turner's classic comparative dictionary of Nepali and Ruth Laila Schmidt's more recent dictionary of modern Nepali. Both are best viewed with a Unicode compliant machine.

• Cornell's Nepali-English/Nepali-English Dictionary
• Mark Turin's Thangmi-Nepali-English Dictionary
• Bruce Adcock's 420-word Unicode Nepali dictionary
• Nepal Homepage's English to Nepali Dictionary
• Ralph Turner's Comparative Dictionary of the Nepali Language
• Ruth Laila Schmidt's Practical Dictionary of Modern Nepali

Dr. Karl-Heinz Kraemer has a number of dictionaries available on his excellent NepalResearch.org website. He has compiled both a Nepali-English and a Nepali-German dictionary which can be searched using Adobe Reader after being downloaded for free from his site. The Nepali font used in his dictionaries is embedded, but it helps to have Kantipur installed on your own computer.