Berntsen Marathi-English - Google Play

The Berntsen Marathi-English Dictionary app is a product of the Digital South Asia Library program (http://dsal.uchicago.edu) at the University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu). The app offers a searchable version of Maxine Berntsen's "A Basic Marathi-English Dictionary," South Asia Regional Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1975.

The Berntsen Marathi-English Dictionary can be used both online and offline. The online version interacts with a database that runs remotely on a server at the University of Chicago. The offline version uses a database that is created on the Android device upon first download.

By default, the app operates in the online mode.

Berntsen Marathi-English Dictionary allows users to conduct both headword and fulltext queries.

The default mode for this app is to search headwords. To search for a headword, touch the search box at the top (magnifying glass icon) to expose the on-screen keyboard and begin searching. Headwords can be entered in Devanagari, accented latin characters, and unaccented latin characters. For example, headword searches for बकाणा, "bakāṇā," and "bakana" will all yield the definition "large mouthful."

After entering three characters in the search box, a scrollable list of search suggestions will pop up. Touch the word to search for and it will automatically fill in the search field. Or ignore suggestions and enter the search term completely. To execute the search, touch the return button on the keyboard.

For fulltext searching, select the "Search all text" check box in the overflow menu (usually the three vertical dots icon at the top right corner of the screen), then enter the search term in the search box at the top.

To conduct substring matching, select an option from the "Search Options" sub-menu, enter a string in the search field, and touch return. The default for all searching is "Words beginning with." But for example, selecting "Words ending with," "Search all text," and then entering "bility" as the search string will find 14 examples of words that end in "bility."

Search results come first in a numbered list that displays the Marathi headword, the accented latin transliteration of the headword, and a chunk of the definition. To see a full definition, touch the headword link.

The full result page presents definitions in a format that allows the user to select terms to copy and paste for further dictionary searching or for conducting a web search on the term (given an internet connection). In online mode, the full result page also has a page number link that the user can touch to get the full page context of the definition. Link arrows at the top of the full page allow the user to go to previous and next pages in the dictionary.