About the Glossary

First of all, in case you have somehow reached this page without having noticed the Glossary, it is here: http://indics.info/index.php/glossary.

The listing page

At the top of the glossary list page, you'll see links to the three root categories of the picture gallery: Topic, Location and Glossary. These allow you to browse glossaries in a systematic way, grouped into various topics such as Hinduism, Art, Science, etc; by geographic location within India, or by type of glossary, including Pantheon, Geographic and Cuisine. Note also that within topics you'll find an important way to classify glossary headings: Language. (You can also select a language directly using the dropdown list on the right.) A number displayed next to the category name tells you how many glossary headings you'll find in that category. Note that most of the categories have subcategories or children, and the number of items in those are presently not included in this count - so it may well be worth clicking an apparently empty category to find its child categories brimming with interesting entries.

To return to the documents listing page, you'll also see a box titled Options. This lets you go to the Article Map, which at present is more like a dump than a map: it lists all articles on the site, grouped by article type and by category within each type. It's good for an overview of what you can find on the site, but not for much else - this may change in the future. Your second Option is to visit the Archive page, where you can look for articles - not only glossaries - by publication date and by category.

Further down the page you'll find a self-explanatory pager, and options to sort glossary headings by publication date, alphabetically by title, number of times they have been viewed, and by rating.

This is followed by the actual article list at last. You can click either the article title or the Details... link to go to the page with the full glossary description. Below the title you'll see a number of maroon headwords in square brackets. These are links to categories, which let you browse other glossary entries in any of the categories to which this article is assigned. An easy way to find similar headings. There's also a sand-coloured box on the right side, which contains keywords for the article. Clicking one of these will take you to a list of all articles that share that keyword, giving you another way to look for related items.

The display page

The display page of a glossary heading contains the body of the article with the full details, including a Lexicon where different spellings of the word are listed, and a More Info section that links to other articles on the site that have something to do with the glossary entry you are viewing.

The categories list on the list page is replaced by category crumbtrails at the top of the display page - click any of the category names to see more documents in that niche. The keywords box is next to the summary of the article. Below the text you'll see <prev and next> links to read more docs without returning to the list page (previous and next in the order they were published on the site).

If you are a registered user and are logged in, you can rate each article (once only), giving it 0 to 5 stars. Registered users can also add comments to each article. It is recommended that you post generic queries in the Forum rather than in article comments, which should be reserved for discussion of the article at hand.

Submitting glossary articles to the site

It is not as yet possible for visitors to submit glossary entries. In the near future submission will be permitted, and you will also be welcome to submit just a word about which you'd like some language information, without yourself providing the full glossary data. We will try to find out for you what the word means and how it is spelt properly.

However, if you notice an error or inconsistency in an existing glossary item, or you feel something should be added to it, please write a comment to that item. If we agree with your correction or addition, then it will be incorporated into the glossary item itself.