This small work is collated for people, like me, who enjoy listening to ghazhals and reading Urdu poetry in Hindi or English, but are unable to get the essence of the piece because they are stuck not knowing the meaning of a word or two. The arrangement is strictly according to the English alphabet, with the Urdu words being transliterated into roman characters. No attention has been paid to the sequence of letters of Urdu alphabet or the grouping of the words therein.

The user will be able to find words as they ‘sound’ in English. To aid the phonetics, a vowel pronunciation key is provided (see category ‘Vowel Pronunciation Key’). Unlike English, Urdu nouns have a gender, and this is mentioned in column 3 before the word meaning. The origin of the word is also given in column 2, right after the word. For the grammatical and word origin abbreviations, please click on ‘Abbreviations’ under the ‘Table of Contents’.

Many words have their own meaning but they also form complex words; I have used blue highlighting for these and the other words they form. Some words are merely prefixes that cannot be used alone; such prefixes and words they are used with are highlighted in green. To emphasize this, the prefixes and the suffixes are written as two separate ‘words’, even though they are spoken as one. So that the reader may recognize how these words are formed, they are given below the prefix, even though at times this has violated the strict alphabetical order; hopefully he can thus have a better understanding of their meaning.

Some words that can belong to different parts of speech are listed twice.