Brown Telugu-English

About Brown Telugu-English Android App

The Brown Telugu-English dictionary app is a fulltext searchable version of Charles Philip Brown's "A Telugu-English dictionary," new ed., thoroughly rev. and brought up to date ... 2nd ed. Madras: Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1903. It is a product of the Digital South Asia Library program (http://dsal.uchicago.edu) at the University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu).

The Brown Telugu-English dictionary app can be used both online and offline. The online version interacts with a database that runs remotely on a server at the University of Chicago. The offline version uses a database that is created on the Android device upon first download.

By default, the app operates in the online mode.

*Headword Searching*

The default mode for this app is to search headwords. To search for a headword, touch the search box at the top (magnifying glass icon) to expose the on-screen keyboard and begin searching. Headwords can be entered in Telugu, accented latin characters, and unaccented latin characters. For example, headword searches for కరటి, "karaṭi," and "karati" all yield the definition "an elephant."

After entering three characters in the search box, a scrollable list of search suggestions will pop up. Touch the word to search for and it will automatically fill in the search field. Or ignore suggestions and enter the search term completely. To execute the search, touch the return button on the keyboard.

By default, headword searches expand off the end of the search term. Searching for "kar" will generate results for headwords that begin with "kar" and have any number of trailing characters, like "karata" (కరత), "karāṭamu" (కరాటము), etc. To expand the front of a query, users can enter the "%" character at the beginning of search term. For example, "%kar" will find "aṅkāriñcu" (అంకారించు), "antḥkaraṇamu" (అంతఃకరణము), etc. The wildcard character at the front of a word also expands search suggestions.

*Fulltext Searching*

For fulltext searching and advanced search options, select the "Search Options" sub-menu in the overflow menu (usually the three vertical dots icon at the top right corner of the screen).

Fulltext searching supports multiword searching. For example, the search "rice flour" returns 10 results where "rice" and "flour" can be found in the same definition. Multiword searches can be executed with the boolean operators "NOT" and "OR" as well. The search "rice OR flour" returns 280 fulltext results; "rice NOT flour" returns 214 fulltext results.

To conduct substring matching, select an option from the "Search Options" sub-menu, enter a string in the search field, and touch return. The default for all searching is "Words beginning with." But for example, selecting "Words ending with," "Search all text," and then entering "itable" as the search string will find 70 examples of words that end in "itable."

*Results Display*

Search results come first in a numbered list that displays the Telugu headword, the accented latin transliteration of the headword, and a chunk of the definition. To see a full definition, touch the list item.

The full result page presents definitions in a format that allows the user to select terms to copy and paste for further dictionary searching or for conducting a web search on the term (given an internet connection). In online mode, the full result page also has a page number link that the user can click to get the full page context of the definition. Link arrows at the top of the full page allow the user to click to previous and next pages in the dictionary.

*Selecting Online/Offline Mode*

To select either online or offline mode, simply check or uncheck the "Search offline" box in the overflow menu. When in online mode, the world icon at the top of the screen will appear dark; in offline mode, it will appear light.