Zoetmulder began work in 1950, after accepting the position of Chair of Old Javanese at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakart.  He did not have ready access to the major manuscript collections in Bali, Jakarta, and Leyden, and was obliged to rely on romanized copies for the major part of his unpublished sources.  Even after accepting this impediment to "scholarly perfection" he lamented that at the time I did not forsee that it would take thirty years to complete the task (Preface). 

    With the collaboration of Robson (beginning in 1972), Zoetmulder stayed the course.  As it stands, the OJED contains more than 25,500 headword entries, more than 18,000 subheads, nearly 8,500 indications of Sanskrit origin, and over 105,000 corpus citations from more than 120 identified sources. 

    As with similar SEAlang Library projects, our goal is to extend rather than simply reproduce the original print work.  While the OJED was printed as a dictionary with supporting text citations, it is both a dictionary and a text corpus.  In effect, this project exposes the full corpus to discovery tools, returning queries in every available corpus citation context, tabulating any query term's immediate neighbors or collocates, allowing drill-down to multi-word collocations, showing all entries from a particular source, and so on. 

    Although we have opened this site to allow reference and classroom use, it must be considered to be a work in progress.  As Zoetmulder (quoting Robson) notes, spelling was often inconsistent in original manuscripts, a problem that was magnified rather than resolved by the subsequent copyists whose texts he had to rely on.  Software tools are able to reveal ‐ but not rectify ‐ many uncertain points, discussed below under Known issues. 

    Future work at CRCL will focus on making source images and transcribed electronic texts of the original inscriptions and manuscripts freely available, along with with appropriate tools for corpus linguistcs.  See Old Javanese for a basic epigraphic inventory (from Nakada, Kozo. 1982. An Inventory of the Dated Inscriptions in Java. Toyo Bunko, Japan), with texts ‐ known to be flawed ‐ as available (from Sakar, Himansu Bhusan. 1971-1972. Corpus of the inscriptions of Java. K.H. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta).  Please contact us if you are interested in joining this effort. 

Sources
Click any abbreviation in the Sources table, above, to show all entries (try a short one like Adg first).  Click the head of any column (Count, Abbrev ...) to re-sort the table.

Corpus / dictionary searches
  ‐ The long form of a dictionary entry includes corpus citations.  The short form of a dictionary entry does not. 

  ‐ Double-clicking any word automatically copies it to the search box (upper left). 

  ‐ Use the Corpus or Dictionary buttons to search.  Try double-clicking kasub. 

Wild cards Dictionary searches can use * to match any sequence of 1 or more characters.  Try kasu* or *sub or ka*b. 

Automatic search fallback Dictionary headword searches will automatically be extended to subheads, bold words in text, whole words anywhere, and finally partial words anywhere (including citations, if the long form view has been chosen).

Searching definitions Because of automatic search fallback, the text of definitions can be searched.  Try house.