Chuon Nath Dictionary (Khmer–Khmer)

About this tool

This is a Khmer–Khmer dictionary: you type a Khmer word and the answer comes back in Khmer — the way a dictionary works for a native reader, not a language learner. The text behind it is the Chuon Nath dictionary, the first modern monolingual dictionary of the Khmer language. Its compiling committee was formed by royal order in 1915, and the scholar-monk Samdech Sangha Raja Chuon Nath (1883–1969) pushed the first edition to print in 1938. For Cambodian students, writers, translators and anyone checking formal Khmer, it is the reference that explains words through Khmer itself, with Pali and Sanskrit roots shown beside many entries. Two things it is not. It is not a Khmer–English dictionary — there are no English glosses here. And it is not a spellchecker or a full-text search: it matches single headwords exactly, so a pasted sentence, a modern loanword or a nonstandard spelling can all come back "not found".

How it works

Type a word and submit, and the page calls GET /v1/dictionary/chuon-nath on the InKhmer API. The service (chuon-nath-service.ts: loadDictionaryIntoIndex) reads a bundled OpenDocument spreadsheet — chuon_nath_2.0.ods, shipped inside the API image — once, on the first request, and builds an in-memory index of 17,664 headwords. Your input is trimmed and matched exactly against that index: a hit returns every entry row for the headword — part of speech, etymology, pronunciation note, the definition itself and cross-references. A miss returns up to twenty "did you mean" suggestions: headwords that share your prefix, sorted in Khmer order. There is no stemming, fuzzy match or Unicode normalisation — the character sequence must equal the stored headword. Khmer script writes words with no spaces between them, so a pasted phrase rarely matches anything; and text in the legacy Limon encoding is not Unicode at all, so it can never match until converted. The strip of words under the search box is a random five-word sample drawn on each request, not a popularity ranking.

Use cases

• A student writing a Khmer essay checks that a formal word’s spelling and register match the standard reference before submitting the assignment.
• A translator choosing between two Khmer renderings reads both definitions to compare what each word actually covers, instead of guessing.
• A teacher preparing a lesson uses the etymology field to show pupils how a formal term was built from Pali or Sanskrit roots.
• A reader working through a Buddhist text or an older Khmer document looks up archaic vocabulary that everyday dictionaries gloss loosely.
• A writer verifies a "Khmerization" coinage — a word the dictionary committee derived from Pali and Sanskrit — before printing it.
• Someone who knows a word only by ear tries likely spellings and uses the prefix suggestions on a miss to reach the right headword.
• A learner of formal Khmer confirms a headword’s part of speech marker before parsing where it belongs in a sentence.

Frequently asked questions

• Is this the official Chuon Nath dictionary?

  The definitions are the Chuon Nath dictionary text — entries even cross-reference "the dictionary of Samdech Chuon Nath" inside the data itself. But this page is not an official release: the lookup runs on a digitized copy distributed as a spreadsheet, and neither the Buddhist Institute (which publishes the printed work) nor InKhmer edited the text. Treat it as the same entries served electronically, not a certified edition.

• Which edition of the dictionary does it use?

  The file name carries a "2.0" label, but that is the digital file’s version — the data records no print edition. The printed original’s first edition appeared in 1938 after the committee formed in 1915; the edition most often digitized elsewhere is the Buddhist Institute’s 1967 fifth edition. If the exact print lineage matters for a citation, check the word in the printed volumes as well.

• Why does my word come back "not found"?

  The lookup is an exact headword match: no stemming, no fuzzy search, no tolerance for alternate spellings. Words coined or borrowed after the source text — modern technical terms, recent loanwords, slang — simply are not in the index. And because Khmer runs words together without spaces, a pasted phrase matches nothing; search one word at a time. The "did you mean" list shows up to twenty headwords sharing your prefix.

• Why does text copied from an old document not match?

  Documents written in legacy Khmer fonts such as Limon do not contain Khmer Unicode — they store Latin-byte codes that only look like Khmer when the old font renders them. Pasted into a Unicode search box they are invisible to the dictionary. Convert the text to Unicode first with the Limon to Unicode converter on this site, then search the result.

• Does the dictionary work offline?

  No. Every lookup sends a request to the API — the index lives on the server, not on your device. The only thing kept in your browser is the list of words you searched (the twenty most recent), so the page loads offline but a lookup does not. An earlier version of this page’s description claimed cached results; that is not what the code does, and the copy was corrected.

• What do the bracketed abbreviations in an entry mean?

  They are the entry’s fields. The etymology field marks each word’s derivation in shorthand — (បា.) for Pali, (សំ.) for Sanskrit — reflecting how the committee built formal Khmer vocabulary. The pronunciation field gives a reading note, often a syllable breakdown with the subscript consonant shown, for example (សួស-ស្ដី, ជើង ដ) for សួស្ដី. The part-of-speech marker sits beside the headword in italics.

• Are the "trending words" below the search box really trending?

  No — despite the label, they are not measured popularity. The API shuffles the entire 17,664-word index on each request and returns five headwords at random (the getTrendingWords function is a Fisher–Yates shuffle with a five-item limit). Read the strip as a discovery feature — a way to stumble on unfamiliar vocabulary — not as what Cambodia is searching for.

• Does it give English translations of Khmer words?

  No — every definition is in Khmer only. If you need the English meaning of a Khmer word, use the translate tools on this site; if you need a Khmer gloss for an English word, this dictionary cannot provide one either — its headwords and definitions are Khmer throughout, which is exactly what makes it useful for checking formal Khmer usage.

Data and accuracy

Content last reviewed 19 October 2026