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A daily Sanskrit word with its verbal root, meaning, IAST transliteration and a line from a classical text where it appears.
A Sanskrit word-of-the-day deck of 30 terms, each given with its Devanagari form, IAST transliteration, the verbal root (dhātu) it derives from, and a line from a classical source — the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, the Yoga Sūtra or a well-known subhāṣita — where the word actually appears. The card is fixed by the calendar date, so the same date always shows the same word.
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Every card names the dhātu the word is built from, which is what makes the meaning stick.
Each example is an actual line from a classical text, attributed to the work it comes from.
Transliteration follows IAST, the standard used in scholarly editions and dictionaries.
A dhātu is a verbal root — the minimal element from which a family of words is built using prefixes and suffixes. Traditional grammar lists roughly 2,000 of them, and knowing the root is often enough to unpack an unfamiliar word: from √dhṛ, 'to hold', comes dharma, that which holds things together.
It survives as a liturgical and scholarly language and is taught in schools and universities across India, with a small number of people reporting it as a mother tongue in the census. Most learners study it in order to read texts rather than to converse.
IAST, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, is the standard romanisation used in dictionaries and academic editions. It marks long vowels with a macron (ā, ī, ū), retroflex consonants with a dot below (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ) and distinguishes the three sibilants s, ś and ṣ.
Each example is a line from a named classical source, cited with its work and, where it is standard to do so, its chapter and verse. Editions and recensions differ in small ways, so check a critical edition before quoting one in academic work.