Dictionaries
You can search Bangla-Tangla's dictionary along with Samsad's Bengali-English Dictionary and Bangla Abhidhan using this mobile-friendly search page:
This dictionary system has some unique features:
- You can look up verb conjugations like সরিয়েছে.
- You can look up words with case endings and markers, like দিনগুলিতেও.
- You can look up words you don't know how to spell, in either Bangla or roman script (eg, beriye, মিসিয়ে←misspelled).
- You can search the dictionary backward by searching for English words (eg, mango).
Samsad Dictionaries
The excellent Samsad dictionaries are hosted by Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (DDSA) (see the links Biswas-Bengali and Biswas-Bangala). Bangla-Tangla provides an alternative interface to them here in order to address the following issues:
- DDSA has some bugs related to Unicode normalization that make it difficult or impossible to search for certain words. On Chrome and Safari you can't look up words containing য়. On Firefox and Internet Explorer you can't look up words containing ড় or ঢ় (unless you input them as ড + ় and ঢ + ়, which isn't possible on most keyboards). Bangla-Tangla fixes these problems, so you can look up any word on any browser.
- The exact matching feature is broken on DDSA (it always returns no results). Bangla-Tangla fixes that.
- A large number of words in the Samsad dictionaries are defined as extensions of a main entry, but there is no way to find them using DDSA. Bangla-Tangla finds them (eg, বিধানসভা).
If you find the Samsad dictionaries useful online, please support Samsad and buy a hardcopy at your local bookstore. In any case, the online version at UChicago has a lot of missing and garbled entries so you'll need to look those up the old-fashioned way.