Sanskrit tools

Sanskrit is traditionally written in the Devanāgarī writing system, which is very different from the Latin alphabet. To make reading and writing Sanskrit easier for those who are unfamiliar with Devanāgarī, ways of writing Sanskrit using Latin characters have been created (they are called transliteration systems).

In this website, the Sanskrit words are displayed in two ways: in Devanāgarī and in the IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration) transliteration system. The user can enter Sanskrit words in IAST or in a third way: the ITRANS transliteration system.

IAST is a widely used transliteration system. Both Devanāgarī and IAST are hard to write with only the keys available on an ordinary keyboard, because they use special Unicode characters. For that reason, in this website, the input of Sanskrit text by the user can be done in the ITRANS transliteration system, which is much simpler to type with most keyboards.

Below is a table with the correspondence between ITRANS, IAST and Devanāgarī characters:

As you may have noticed, ITRANS has more than one way of writing some Sanskrit characters. For example, the Devanāgarī letter आ is 'ā' in IAST, but can be written as 'aa' or 'A' in ITRANS.

Below are some examples of Sanskrit words written in ITRANS, IAST and Devanāgarī:

Again, notice that some ITRANS words could have been written another way. For example, 'saMskRRita' could be written 'saMskR^ita', and 'j~naana' could be written 'j~nAna', 'GYaana', 'GYAna' and so on.