The Tradition of lexicography in Hindi-Urdu goes back some two centuries, but in most of the work undertaken in this field before the present century it was the Urdu aspect of Hindi-Urdu, with its extensive Persian and Arabic vocabulary, that was stressed. The monumental Hindi-sabd-sagar (1929) was the first major dictionary in the field of Hindi-Urdu to reflect the new circumstances of use of Hindi in the twentieth century. During this period Hindi has developed dramatically in scope, status, and literary versatility and has become effectively standardized as a language of public life, with corresponding effects upon its lexicon. Several successful monolingual and bilingual dictionaries of the modern language have been based upon the Hindi sabd-sagar during recent decades. Yet the monolingual Hindi sabd-sagar itself drew on its predecessors. One of these, I.T. Platts’s Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (1884), has continued to be regarded by speakers of English as a valuable complement to it for the study of both modern and early Hindi. The organization of Platts’s work as an Urdu dictionary has limited its accessibility to students of Hindi, however, while the datedness of its lexical record, style of presentation, and treatment of etymology has made production of a new Hindi-English dictionary of comparable scale desirable for some time. The present work is an attempt to meet that need. Tehre was good reason to make an editing of Platts’s dictionary (as proposed by Oxford University Press, its publisher) the first stage in producing such a work, but clearly the task would go far beyond this, and would involve not only a complete revision of Platts’s material but also collation of the Hindi sabd-sagar and reference to other modern lexicographical materials, together with collection of new material from Hindi literary texts and other printed sources.
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