FOUR speaking world, he wanted to do for all the Maharashtrians, the readers of newspapers and magazines, the school, college and university students, the pursuers of literature, of arts and of the many sciences which were introducíng new ideas which demanded new words to express them. A hundred thousand words was the target he set before himself. In order to render them fully and accurately he had to collect equivalent terms in Marathi that would lucidly define the English words to the satisfaction of all the consultants. His dictionary was to be an up-to-date, comprehensive, aid to whoever turned to it for help with the understanding of English in all its richness and with all its nicities and delicate shades of meaning. A stupendous task, this; but he set about it with a firm determination 4 carried it through creditably, fulfilling the expectations of the Government and the people. Since the birth of the idea in 1893, he worked and worked hard assembling his material before the first part of the Dictionary consisting of the letter A only, running into 120 pages could be published (1903). The remaining parts were published almost yearly, the last, sixteenth in 1916. He had been at it’ for nearly a quarter of a century. The bulk of his material came from his own wide but well-oriented reading from his many visits to the laboratories, the zoos and the workshop where he could pick up Spoken Marathi from the lips of the workers in the various walks of life. His wide reading covered Sanskrit, old Marathi as well as the sister languages spoken and written in the West (Gujarati), the North (Hindi), the East (Bengali) and the South (Tamil, Malyalam, Telgu). He felt-and rightly so- that this was not enough preparation. He sought and obtained advise and altogther new material from many of his friends. Rightly did he feel that no one man could know everything and hence the entries in the Dictionary were submitted to a Revision Committee for possible correctiuns and improvements. Possessing intellectual ability of a high order, a right observant scholar interested in life in all its aspects, he acted as a powerful magnet drawing towards him quite a sizeable body of specialists in many subjects. Great men like Sir Bhalchandra Krishna Bhatvadekar and Professor T. K. Gajjar helped him, the former supplying him Marathi coinages for botanical terms, the later those for physics and chemistry.
