The Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT), under the aegis of the Union Education Ministry, has launched a unique website which provides technical terms in all 22 official Indian languages.

The web portal ‘shabd.education.gov.in’ aims to be a central repository for all the terminologies prepared for Indian languages. Besides all the glossaries of CSTT, other institutions or agencies having such dictionaries are also able to host their work in digital form on this platform.

As of now, 450 dictionaries amounting to three million words are available on the website, senior officials said.

Through this platform, the users are not only be able to search the equivalent terms of scientific and technical terminology in Indian languages but also be able to register their feedback for the equivalents already prepared by the CSTT, they said. The user will have various options for search, whether based on languages, subjects, dictionary type, or language pairs. Not only this, the user can choose to search in a specific glossary or through the entire collection.

The launch of the website assumes significance amid efforts to provide technical education, including in medicine and engineering, in Indian languages.

The CSTT, was set up in December 1960, with the objective to evolve and define scientific and technical terms in Hindi and all Indian languages. It also routinely publishes a large number of textbooks and monographs besides publishing quarterly journals named Vigyan Garima Sindhu and Gyan Garima Sindhu.

It also undertakes publication of administrative and various departmental glossaries that are widely used by various government departments, institutions, research laboratories, autonomous organisation and public sector units besides organising workshops, seminars, symposiums, conferences, orientation and training programmes to increase the use and popularise the standard terminology of Hindi and other Indian languages.

The officials said that from March 2024, when the portal was launched, there have been 1,22,643 hits to the site from many areas of the country as well as abroad.

Explaining the process of collating the words, Professor Girish Nath Jha, chairman of CSTT, said special subject-based committees focused on finding out the words in their specific areas while separate language committees collated the standard versions. The commission was aided by the National Translation Mission of the Department of Higher Education of the Education Ministry.

The words were also taken from various definitional dictionaries, glossaries, and reference materials which have been published by the CSTT over the years.