Shabdkosh.com is an online Hindi to English and English to Hindi dictionary. It is also offered in various Indian Languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu etc.
This site was conceptualized, designed and implemented by Maneesh Soni in late 2003. He created this site out of passion for Hindi language and for the internet as an enabling technology. He is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India where he studied Electrical Engineering.
Maneesh was always very passionate about Hindi language. This may be because of the environment in his family where his grandfather was a learned scholar and author in several languages including Hindi. When he came to the United States, he saw that the internet was growing rapidly and transforming people’s lives. He tried to look for websites in Hindi and found none that were of good quality. Being an engineer, he investigated and found that computer systems were just beginning to have built-in support for Hindi. He thought of building a website in Hindi. Shabdkosh.com, an online English Hindi dictionary started as a small project with an aim to just make a website in Hindi. Dictionary was chosen as an application because there was no good quality online dictionary at the time and also because making a dictionary involves lot of challenge.
To market the website, he just sent a message to a Hindi users group on internet. To his surprise, people actually visited, liked the site and also provided him with feedback. He incorporated their feedback and over time, he improved the site. The first version was a very simple site with about 15,000 words from the public domain dictionary compiled by Ram Narain Lal in 1936. Over time, the vocabulary was improvised and today it has tens of thousands of words.
