Enter a word in the citation field, and press the return key to display the entry. The first dictionary entry is shown whose beginning matches what is typed; if the first entry is not matched exactly, the full spelling of what is matched is shown in bold below the word entered. A page number (from 1 to 982) may be entered instead of a word.
Below the entry appears a list of the headwords for the page retrieved. These are split into two columns corresponding to the columns on the page. Each word is clickable, and highlights the particular word within the scanned image.
To the right, the scanned image of the page is shown, with the matched word highlighted; the page is scrolled so that the highlighted word is visible.
In the upper left of the display of the page, the '<' and '>' characters may be clicked to go to the preceding or following pages of the dictionary.
The web page was developed using the Firefox 3.0 browser in the Windows XP operating system. Limited testing indicates that all features work satisfactorily with the IE7 and Google Chrome browsers in Windows XP, and the Safari browser on Macintosh (X10.4).
By default, the input word is to be entered in the HK (Harvard-Kyoto) transliteration, and the output list of words appears in Unicode Devanagari. The selection menus offer other choices for both input and output. The Help page for the Monier-Williams display discusses these choices.
There are differences in spelling of Sanskrit words between the Wilson Dictionary and the Monier-Williams dictionary. For instance, 'karmman' in Wilson corresponds to 'karman' in Monier-Williams. Also, roots with a final consonant in Monier often appear in Wilson with a vowel suffix; e.g., 'gam' in MW is cited as 'gama' in Wilson. The 'prefix' lookup mode should make most such spelling differences easy to work around. For instance, entering 'karm' will get to 'karmma', and 'gam' will get to 'gama'.