The word lens

The word lens is the right sidebar of a text reader. It turns a word in a specific passage into an entry point for lexical, grammatical, and corpus-wide exploration.

What you may see

Availability depends on the selected token and the corpus data, but an entry can include:

• the headword or lemma and the surface form selected in the passage;
• part of speech and grammatical features such as case, gender, number, tense, or mood;
• dictionary definitions and a short lexical preview;
• a related verbal root (dhātu), its Devanāgarī form, gaṇa, and meaning;
• the number of texts in which the lemma occurs and links to those texts;
• a corpus profile: frequency, part of speech, and distribution;
• semantic classifications, text distribution, and sample concordance contexts.

Reading form and lemma together

The form is what appears in the passage. The lemma is the normalized dictionary form used to collect related inflected forms. A word lens therefore helps distinguish “what this passage says” from “what lexical item this form belongs to.”

Compounds

Sanskrit compounds can conceal several lexical components in one written form. If the parser has a compound breakdown, the lens displays its components first. Select one of them to inspect its independent lemma entry. If analysis is unavailable, the lens says so rather than guessing.

Using occurrence information carefully

Frequency and occurrence lists reveal patterns in the current corpus, not in all Sanskrit literature. A frequent lemma may be grammatically ordinary; a rare lemma may be significant, corrupt, or simply underrepresented in the available texts. Always return to passages before drawing an interpretation.