The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary

But understand, it's from Hindi to English ONLY, not the other way around. The devanagari is nice, bold, and easy to read.

As in my review of Verma's Oxford English-Hindi dictionary, I preface this by saying that I am an American English speaker, but one who was trained at the University of Wisconsin in Hindi and have several years of Hindi language experience, including two years in northern India.

MacGregor has developed an excellent resource, but both of the Oxford Hindi dictionaries should be more inclusive of contemporary Hinglish, Urdu and Marathi loan words, borrowed English, and Bollywood/Hindi internet slang usage. Bombay is an influential city and a good dictionary should reflect that. Ideally I would like a dictionary to allow me to translate most of what I might see in a contemporary Bollywood movie such as one of the "Munna Bhai" films.

As in my other review I recommend Hindi beginners try to find a class in Hindi, get an audio course, and a native speaker tutor if at all possible. Too many sounds in Hindi do not have an easy English phonetic equivalent. As tempting as having a romanized version of this dictionary might be, there is no substitute for Devanagari, and the proliferation of different transliteration systems can be more confusing than helpful. Oxford was right on in sticking with Devanagari.

Keep up the good work Oxford!

I have no prior experience with devanagri or with the Hindi alphabet, I was HOPING to use this to translate some words in songs or movies I saw, but it is nearly impossible to use as an effective reference in this way without the background knowledge I mentioned.

I wish I would have known there was no English to Hindi section in this dictionary before buying it.

I am still baffled as to why it was the only dictionary required for a Hindi 101 class.

If you are an English speaker attempting to learn Hindi but do not know Hindi script, do not buy THIS dictionary! All of the words are "alphabetized" by Hindi script, making it nearly impossible to look up a word you may only know the romanization of. for example, I have not learned any sript yet, but I wanted to look up the word "shanti." I still can't find where it is.

I know i ordered the wrong book.