A REVERSE DICTIONARY OF URDU

Although only two of the world’s languages, Chinese and English can claim to have more speakers than Hindi-Urdu, scholars of Hindi and Urdu, have until now lacked a basic research tool that linguists specializing in many less widely spoken languages have come to take for granted: a reverse dictionary. To help remedy this situation, Donald A. Becker has compiled A Reverse Dictionary of Urdu. Reverse dictionaries, i.e. lists of words arranged alphabetically according to their final rather than their initial letters, serve the needs of a variety of users. To linguists interested in the processes of word derivation employed in a given language, a reverse dictionary provides an instant 'read-out' of all important words ending in a particular suffix or stem. Poets and students of poetry may use a reverse dictionary as a source of rhyming words.