Looking up a Tamil word is more involved than looking up an English one, because Tamil is agglutinative — a single written word can carry a root plus several suffixes, and the form in front of you may not be the form in the dictionary.
Why the word you see is not the entry
Tamil attaches grammatical information as suffixes rather than as separate words. A noun can carry case, number and postposition; a verb can carry tense, person, number and mood. The result is that veedugalilirundhu ('from the houses') is one written word containing several elements.
| Element | Contributes |
|---|---|
| veedu | house — the root, and the dictionary entry |
| -gal | plural |
| -il | locative case, 'in' |
| -irundhu | ablative, 'from' |
To look a word up, you generally need the root. Removing recognisable suffixes from the end is the practical approach, and a dictionary that handles inflected forms saves that step.
Diglossia: two registers
Tamil maintains a formal literary register and a colloquial spoken one, and they differ substantially — in vocabulary, in verb endings and in pronunciation. Dictionaries index the literary form.
| Meaning | Literary | Spoken |
|---|---|---|
| What? | enna | enna / ennaa |
| Coming | varugiraan | varraan |
| House | veedu | veedu / voodu |
Someone learning from conversation frequently cannot find words in a dictionary for this reason — the spoken form has contracted away from the written one. Searching a plausible literary form, or asking a speaker for it, resolves most cases.
Sounds English does not distinguish
Tamil has three l sounds (ல, ள, ழ) and two n sounds that English writes identically. If a search fails, trying the alternative letter is often the fix — the difference is phonemic in Tamil and inaudible to most English speakers.
The letter ழ, transliterated zh, has no English equivalent at all. It appears in common words including the language's own name, and it is the sound most often mistyped.
Loanwords
Tamil has absorbed vocabulary from Sanskrit, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian and English over many centuries. Some loans have established Tamil spellings and dictionary entries; recent English borrowings often do not, and may be written phonetically in Tamil script or left in Roman letters. A word you cannot find may simply be too recent a borrowing to have been indexed.
Classical Tamil
Tamil is one of the world's oldest continuously used literary languages, with a corpus stretching back around two thousand years. Sangam-era vocabulary differs considerably from modern usage, and words in classical texts may carry meanings that have shifted or been lost. A general dictionary will not always help with Thirukkural or Sangam poetry — those need a dictionary or commentary covering classical usage.
Searching effectively
- Strip suffixes to find the root before searching.
- Try both the Tamil script and a transliteration.
- If a search fails, try the alternative l or n letter.
- For a word heard in speech, try a more formal spelling.
- For classical texts, use a source that covers older usage.