The dictionaries

The first substantial Punjabi dictionary was compiled by missionaries at Ludhiana in the nineteenth century, for the purpose of translating the Bible.

Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha's Mahan Kosh, 1930, is the great work: an encyclopaedia of Sikh literature, history, music and terminology in four volumes, compiled over fourteen years, and still the standard reference.

Punjabi University Patiala produced the multi-volume Punjabi-English dictionary and a series of technical glossaries intended to make Punjabi usable for science and administration.

Those glossaries were the practical part of the university's founding mandate and they are largely unused, because the administration and the sciences did not switch.

On the Pakistani side, dictionary work in Shahmukhi Punjabi has been done by individuals and small institutions with almost no state support.

No single dictionary covers the whole language across both scripts and both countries, which is an achievable project that nobody has undertaken.

Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha was in the service of the Nabha state and also wrote Ham Hindu Nahin, the book that put the Sikh case as a separate tradition during the Singh Sabha argument. The same man produced the polemic and the reference work, and only one of the two is still read.

A dictionary needs a corpus and Punjabi has never had one. There is no comprehensive machine readable body of Punjabi text across both scripts against which a compiler could check how a word is actually used, so the entries rest on whatever the compiler happened to have read.

There is no historical dictionary of Punjabi on the model of the large European dictionaries, which would show when a word entered the language and how its sense moved.

What we don't know

  • Whether a comprehensive cross-script Punjabi dictionary is in progress anywhere. Not that this project can find.

Where to check this

  1. Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha, Mahan Kosh. Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha, Mahan Kosh (Internet Archive) ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Punjabi University lexicographic publications.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 62 accounts in What the Voice Carried, the chapter of this site covering the poetry, the music and the oral tradition.