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. Language teachers can look up any compound or complex word in a reverse dictionary and find on the same page many similarly constructed forms, which – when presented to their students as a structured set – will help the latter to acquire one of the semantic building blocks of the language Becker’s Reverse Dictionary of Urdu contains approximately 39,000 words (including many personal and geographical names). It is printed in the nasx form of the Arabo-Persian script. A special feature of the work is its inclusion of many Urdu borrowings from English. An English introduction contains a detailed guide to the use of the work. About the Author Donald A. Becker was Professor of German and Linguistics, University of Wisconsin (Madison). Gopi Chand Narang was Professor and Head, Department of Urdu, Jamia Millia Islamia.
