Ratna's Basic Nepali Dictionary

About the Book Nepali Language belongs to the Indo-Aryan family and has a deep root in Sanskrit. It has words borrowed from Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and in the recent times, English (particularly the technical terms like radio, television, computer, etc.).

From a regional spoken language of the western hills of Nepal (then known as Khas Bhasha), it spread and developed as a literary language during the past few centuries and became The National Language of Nepal in the 1960's. It has been adopted by people who have their own speaken (and in some cases, written) languages like Newari, Tamang, Rai, Limbu, Magar, Sherpa, Maithili, Bhojpuri, etc. It is the lingua franca among the various peoples inhabiting the country. It is also used in Darjeeling, Sikkim and north-eastern part of India, Bhutan and some parts of Tibet.

Preface We are glad to introduce this two-in-one version of English-Nepali/Nepali-English Dictionary.

This gives a complete look to a common bilingual dictionary. While compiling and revising this edition, we have added and deleted whatever were necessary (current) and unnecessary (outdated and out of place) for a pocket dictionary of this size.

Thus it is a very concise dictionary of both English and Nepali. It contains only basic words of the given languages. Therefore, we request our esteemed readers to refer to other dictionaries and books cited at the end for reference and detailed information.

We also request our valuable readers to bear with certain changes in the two parts despite our endeavour to strike uniformity. For example, English part has main entry, part of speech, and its meaning in Roman and Devanagari. But the Nepali part has main entry, roman transcription in slashes , part of speech, and its meaning in English. The following Notes will be a useful guide before plunging into the dictionary.

**Contents and Sample Pages**