About

Alar is an authoritative Kannada-English dictionary corpus created by V. Krishna. It contains over 150,000 Kannada words with over 240,000 English definitions. It is released as an open data corpus licensed under the Open Database License (ODC-ODbL).

V. Krishna

V. Krishna started building his Kannada-English dictionary in the 1970s as a hobby project. This incredible endeavour spanning four decades has now evolved into an invaluable contribution to Kannada language. In addition to authoring the colossal dictionary, he single-handedly digitised his original manuscripts. In 2019, he open sourced the entire dictionary. Read the full story here.

He is a resident of Bengaluru and spends his time working on his dictionary and other Kannada literature projects. He has recently started laying foundations for a new English-Kannada dictionary. He can be reached at vkrishna1411@yahoo.co.in.

Data

The corpus is available on the Alar repository. It is licensed under ODC-ODbL.

The audio pronunciation corpus was generated by Aditya DS using Google TTS AI.

Website

This website is published using dictpress, and uses knphone, a Kannada phonetic indexing algorithm, for search. Search suggestions and transliterations are powered by Varnam. The website's source is available here.

Technical feedback can be sent to kailash@nadh.in.

In 2019, Zerodha collaborated with V. Krishna to open source and publish his dictionary online and awarded him a grant to support his work.

Since 2023, Alar is a project under Indic Digital Archive Foundation.