A Comprehensive Tamil and English Dictionary of High and Low Tamil. Assisted by competent native scholars, in part from manuscript materials of the late Rev. Joseph Knight, and others.

WINSLOW, Miron

Published by Printed and Published by P. R. Hunt, Madras, 1863

About this Item

First edition of this seminal dictionary. Thick quarto (8 x 10 1/2 inches). ix, [1], [2. subscriber and donation list], 974 pp. Lacking the errata leaf at the end. Half title present and clean but loose (no ragged edges though), first two leaves with the top corner silked, last three leaves with reinforced edges. Preevious owner's name on fron fly leaf. Full and oldish black leather with gilt spine lettering. A very good copy of a surprisingly rare book.was an American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionary to the American Ceylon Mission, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he established a mission at Oodooville and founded a seminary. He founded a mission station at Madras, the first and chief station of the American Madras Mission. He is best remembered for his A Comprehensive Tamil and English Dictionary of High and Low Tamil, a Tamil to English lexicon which took twenty years of missionary labor to compile sixty-seven thousand Tamil words. This dictionary was based in part on manuscript material of the pastor Joseph Knight, of the London Missionary Society, and the Rev. Samuel Hutchings, of the American mission, and was the most complete dictionary of a modern Indian language published at that time. The book later become the basis for the more exhaustive Tamil Lexicon dictionary published by the University of Madras in 1924.

Seller Inventory # 75355

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Comprehensive Tamil and English Dictionary of High and Low Tamil. Assisted by competent native scholars, in part from manuscript materials of the late Rev. Joseph Knight, and others.
• Publisher: Printed and Published by P. R. Hunt, Madras
• Publication Date: 1863