Credits

Tools

Astro — the static site generator. Open source, MIT licensed. astro.build.

Codex — engineering implementation. The components, schema, and routing were built by Codex against atomic specs.

Claude (Anthropic) — drafting partner. Used for first-pass etymological essays, structural critique, and editorial tightening. Every entry is then revised, sourced, and signed off by hand.

Obsidian — the working notebook where drafts live before publication.

Vercel — hosting.

Sources

The lexicon’s etymological claims are anchored in five reference traditions. Where a claim is sourced, it cites one of these.

The Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (DEDR), Burrow and Emeneau, 1984 (revised). Hosted by the Digital South Asia Library at the University of Chicago. The standard reference for Proto-Dravidian roots and cognate sets. dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/burrow.

The Tamil Lexicon (Madras University), six volumes, 1924 to 1936, with supplement. The canonical Tamil-to-Tamil and Tamil-to-English dictionary, still unsurpassed in coverage and citation density. Also at DSAL. dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/tamil-lex.

Project Madurai — the digital corpus of classical Tamil texts. Sangam works, Tolkāppiyam, Bhakti hymns, and post-classical literature. projectmadurai.org.

Tolkāppiyam — the oldest extant Tamil grammar, cited in the editions of U.V. Swaminatha Iyer and modern critical editions where available.

Modern scholarship — primarily Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, The Dravidian Languages (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kamil Zvelebil, Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature (Brill, 1992) and related works; and Robert Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856), used historically rather than as current authority.

Translations

The lexicon’s English renderings of Sangam poems lean substantially on the work of Palaniappan Vairam Sarathy, whose blog Old Tamil Poetry has, since around 2015, published line-by-line glosses and translations of Sangam, Bhakti, and post-classical Tamil verse, free and ad-free. Where this lexicon quotes a Sangam line, the translation has either been drawn from his work and edited for the lexicon’s register, or used as a check against the editor’s own reading. Translations and their interpretive choices are credited in each entry’s sources block.

Sangam Tamil verse, like all classical poetry, lives or dies by its translators. The lexicon’s debt here is large.

The following translators and translation projects are part of the site’s working source base:

• Palaniappan Vairam Sarathy, Old Tamil Poetry — translation backbone for many Kuṟuntokai citations, especially where the entry needs a close gloss rather than only a literary rendering.
• Vaidehi Herbert, Sangam Poems Translated by Vaidehi — complete English translation of the Sangam corpus, used as a cross-check and corpus-wide reference.
• A.K. Ramanujan, The Interior Landscape (1967) and Poems of Love and War (1985) — foundational English renderings of akam poetry and the Sangam interior/exterior landscapes.
• George L. Hart, Poems of Ancient Tamil (1975), and George L. Hart with Hank Heifetz, The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom — major Puṟanāṉūṟu translations and interpretive context.

Editorial

Concept, voice, and editorial direction: Rajhesh Panchanadhan.

Errors

Any error in this lexicon is the editor’s responsibility, not the sources’. If you find one, see contribute.