Department of Lexicography

Department of Lexicography

Anthologising Encyclopaedias, Indices, concordances, besides compiling mono-lingual and Bi-lingual dictionaries apart from collecting all the available dictionaries and thesaurus to the archival unit of the Department, are a few of the aims and objectives of this Department.With financial support from the Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India, four - volumes of monolingual Tamil dictionary have been brought out. Compilation of the Scientific Tamil dictionary is given a thrust fulfilling the long-felt need for a Dictionary of Scientific Tamil words. Preparing a complete DataBase of Tamil classical vocabulary ranging from Sangam Literature to Modern Tamil is also on the anvil.

Courses offered

Master of Arts (MA)
Master of Philosophy (MPhil)
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Objectives

=> To impart Lexicographic knowledge and training among school, college and university teachers and research scholars in Indian Languages, especially in Tamil.
=> To inculcate lexicographic principles among students in order to promote their language skills.
=> To compile basic reference works that will be useful to Tamil language and literacy, research activities.
=> To establish an archive consisting of rare Nighantus and Tamil dictionaries.
=> To compile bilingual and multilingual dictionaries with Tamil as source language.
=> To promote interdisciplinary lexicographic activities by compiling Scientific and Technical dictionaries.
=> To propagate the use of ‘computers’ in dictionary making and to evolve principles for computerized Tamil Lexicography.
=> To prepare a complete ‘Database’ of Tamil classical vocabulary ranging from Sangam literature to Modern Tamil.
=> To publish different types of Tamil Encyclopedia and Indices.

Achievements

=> The department has organized 6 seminars, 4 Refresher courses and 6 workshops.
=> The faculty members of the department have completed 25 research projects
=> The faculty members have published 18 books