Home page of 'Sabdatharavali'
Thrissur: The authentic dictionary of Malayalam ‘Sabdatharavali’ will now be available online too. A website has been opened for ‘Sabdatharavali’, the over 2000-page dictionary prepared by Sreekandeshwaram Padmanabha Pillai.
‘Sabdatharavali’ is considered as the most authentic dictionary in Malayalam language. Padmanabha Pillai took about 20 years to complete the first part of the book. The digital version of the dictionary has been released after 5 years of effort.
Thiruvananthapuram-headquartered ‘Sayahna Foundation’ headed by C V Radhakrishnan initiated preparations for the digital edition of the dictionary. Sayahna was formed for conserving books in Malayalam. It is a global collective that create digital versions of books in order to protect them.
Scanned PDF copies of the original book also is available along with the digital edition. ‘Sabdatharavali’ is also accessible on servers of Lexonomy, an open source platform for dictionaries. The effort to create the digital edition of ‘Sabdatharavali’ was initiated after the original work was found at a seminary in Bengaluru in 2015.
All pages of the dictionary were scanned by Shiju Alex, Viswaprabha, Baiju Ramakrishnan, Benjamin Varghese and V S Sunil. Then these were converted into Unicode by the staff of River Valley Technology in Malayinkeezhu along with K A Abhijith, Manoj Karingamadathil, Sreelatha Pillai and others.
C V Radhakrishnan said that they had to work hard during the correction phase. A group of language lovers headed by Prof Lissy Mathew of Kalady University helped to complete this session. Many including actor Mammootty, professionals, housewives, researchers and students took part in the activity. Digital edition of ‘Sabdatharavali’ can be accessed via the link https://stv.sayahna.org/