The Oxford English-Urdu Dictionary.

• Author: Virani, Shafique N.
• Position: Book Review

The Oxford English-Urdu Dictionary. Edited and translated by SHANUL HAQ HAQQEE. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. Pp. xxiv + 2099.

A reliable dictionary is one of the foremost tools necessary to understand the language and culture of another civilization. Sadly, the production of bilingual lexicons for Oriental languages lags far behind that of their European counterparts. Users of English-French or English-German dictionaries, for example, for whom the appearance of new, updated, and revised volumes is a regular occurrence, would be amused to discover that their colleagues who need to look up the English equivalent of an Urdu word still reach to their bookshelves for reprints of John T. Platts' venerable Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English, first published in 1884 (with its fourth, and last, impression in 1911) or, in the reverse direction, for Maulvi Abdul Haq's The Standard English-Urdu Dictionary, published in 1937. Jamil Jalibi's 1992 Qaumi Angrezi-Urdu Lughat was a major step forward in this direction, and it is now joined by the work under review. The laudable efforts of Shanul Haq Haqqee and Oxford University Press in producing The Oxford English-Urdu Dictionary must therefore be greeted with great enthusiasm.

The compiler of the work, Shanul Haq Haqqee, is a well-respected Urdu literary figure. Born in 1918 and educated at Aligarh and Delhi, he was the recipient in 1968 of Pakistan's Tamgha-yi Qa'id-i A'zam and in 1986 of the Sitara-yi Imtiyaz. Haqqee's contribution is note-worthy not only for the fact that he has almost single-handedly done the work usually expected of a committee of lexicographers, but that he accomplished much of this mammoth feat, taking over a decade, while a septuagenarian. The bilingual dictionary was planned as a translation of the eighth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which appeared in 1990. In 1995, however, when Haqqee had completed entries A-M, the ninth edition of the Concise Oxford was released. The remaining entries were therefore based on the newer publication. The last few letters, from U-Z, were translated by Haqqee's colleague, Muhammad Salim al-Rahman, and then reviewed by Haqqee himself. The final product is a handsome, accessible, and erudite volume.

The headwords are, for the most part, well glossed with useful definitions. However, the work is clearly meant...