An Urdu Thesaurus at Your Fingertips!

For the first time in the world an online Urdu Thesaurus was launched in Pakistan. It is proving to be a very helpful resource for those who read and write in Urdu, that is why in the past five months it has met with great success, nationally as well as internationally. It is being used in more than a 100 countries and around 800 cities at present. The majority of the people belong to Canada, India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, UK & USA.

It was developed and released by the publishing house KITAB, which belongs to renowned novelist and translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi, who has been working on it for the past five years with a team of professionals. The idea was born out of the deep love he has for the National Language. At the moment it consists of more than 40,000 words with its associated 20,000 sets of synonyms, and new words are being added every day. However the data gathering began a decade ago, where he collected numerous dictionaries, but to make the database, nine dictionaries were carefully selected, while more will be consulted as it expands.

An App for Androids (one for iOS is under development) has also been made available, which makes it even more accessible and allows users to share data with each other through social media. It has had a very good response as there have been about 7000-10,000 downloads to date.

Future Plans for Urdu Thesaurus

Yet this is only the beginning to what will hopefully evolve into a very comprehensive educational tool by including a multitude of features from antonyms, idioms, phrases, proverbs and doubling the current number of synonyms to bilingual dictionaries, complex translations, specific terminologies that are related to different fields, and most importantly a vocabulary building tool for children so that they can become proficient from an early age. Once all has been completed then it would also be published in print form too.

You can find the thesaurus here: www.UrduThesaurus.com, and can download the free App here: Play Store Link

However as this project is currently self-funded, a lot of financial assistance is required to make it into a cohesive language service, so if anyone is interested in helping; visit the following link to see how: http://urduthesaurus.com/donate