50 Fun Facts About Sanskrit

Which fruit's English name travelled from Sanskrit nāraṅga through Persian, Arabic and Old French?

Orange reached English by way of Persian nārang, Arabic nāranj and Old French orenge, and the Sanskrit word itself was borrowed from a Dravidian language.

Which English word comes from Sanskrit jaṅgala, which described rough, arid land rather than dense forest?

Jungle flipped its meaning on the way into English: Sanskrit jaṅgala meant rough and arid terrain, and the word reached English in the 18th century through jangal, the Hindustani word for forest.

Which confection's name goes back through Arabic qandi and French to Sanskrit khaṇḍa, a word for sugar?

Candy descends from khaṇḍa, the pieces of sugar that ancient Indians made by boiling down sugarcane juice; the word arrived in English as sugre-candi.

Which Star Wars film's 'Duel of the Fates' has a choir singing a Welsh poem translated into Sanskrit?

The Phantom Menace debuts the piece during its final lightsaber duel, with John Williams having the London Voices sing lines from the medieval Welsh poem Cad Goddeu in Sanskrit.

Which Sanskrit motto, 'truth alone triumphs', sits beneath the Lion Capital on India's state emblem?

Satyameva Jayate comes from the Mundaka Upanishad and was adopted as India's national motto on 26 January 1950, the day the republic was born, so it now appears on every banknote.

Which big cat's name reached English via Hindi from Sanskrit chitra-ya, 'variegated' or 'painted'?

Cheetah takes its name from the spotted coat the Sanskrit word describes; the animal itself is built for speed, with a small head, deep chest and long limbs.

Sanskrit nouns and verbs distinguish three grammatical numbers: singular, plural and which other?

Dual number is a fully working category in Sanskrit, used not just for natural pairs like hands or eyes but for any collection of two things.

Guru, now English for any expert, is a Sanskrit adjective that literally means what?

Heavy is the root sense, glossed by tradition as 'heavy with knowledge' or weighty with spiritual wisdom, which is why a guru outranks a mere instructor.

Which 2004 science-fiction TV series uses a version of the Sanskrit Gayatri mantra as its title music?

Battlestar Galactica's title music, credited as 'Gayatri' by Richard Gibbs, carries the Rigveda verse over the opening credits of a show about robots hunting the last humans.

Avatar, the Sanskrit word James Cameron borrowed for his 2009 film, literally means what?

Descent is the literal sense of avatāra, the coming-down of a god into earthly form in times of distress, long before the word meant a screen persona.

Which state in 2010 became the first in India to make Sanskrit its second official language?

Uttarakhand moved in 2010, and Himachal Pradesh became the second state to give Sanskrit that status in 2019, each placing it alongside Hindi in official use.

Sanskrit became an official 'classical language' of India in 2005, a year after which language was first?

Tamil won the status in 2004, when the government first set criteria for the label, and Sanskrit followed by a notification dated 25 November 2005.

Mattur, nicknamed the 'Sanskrit village' because residents converse in it daily, lies in which Indian state?

Karnataka's Mattur sits on the Tunga river about 4 km from Shivamogga, long a centre of Vedic study, and Sanskrit is the main language of most of its 5,000 residents and a required subject in its schools.

Sudharma, a daily newspaper printed in Sanskrit, was launched in July 1970 in which city?

Mysuru was still called Mysore when scholar Varadaraja Iyengar launched Sudharma, and the paper went out mainly by post after news vendors refused to stock it.

Through Arabic sifr, which translated Sanskrit śūnya, 'empty', English gained 'zero' and which other word?

Cipher also descends from sifr and for centuries simply meant the zero sign, while zero arrived later by way of Italian zero and Medieval Latin zephirum.

Which Sanskrit phrase, 'the world is one family', was the theme of India's G20 presidency in 2023?

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam comes from the Maha Upanishad and is engraved in the entrance hall of India's Parliament; the G20 logo rendered it as 'One Earth, One Family, One Future'.

Which English word for a Chinese official came via Portuguese and Malay from Sanskrit mantrin, 'an adviser'?

Mandarin passed through Malay menteri and Portuguese mandarim before English applied it to imperial bureaucrats, and only later to the language they spoke.

Ashoka's 3rd-century BCE edicts, India's oldest major inscriptions, were mostly in which language, not Sanskrit?

Magadhi Prakrit in the Brahmi script carries the edicts through central and eastern India, and Ashoka called them Dhamma Lipi, 'inscriptions of the Dharma'; Sanskrit prose came later.

Indonesia's state philosophy, Pancasila, takes its name from two Sanskrit words meaning what?

Five principles joins pañca, 'five', to śīla, 'principles' or 'precepts', and Sukarno proposed them in a speech on 1 June 1945 as the basis of an independent Indonesia.

Which country's coat of arms carries a Sanskrit motto declaring mother and motherland greater than heaven?

Nepal prints Jananī Janmabhūmiśca Svargādapi Garīyasī on a red scroll at the base of an emblem that also shows Mount Everest and the joined hands of a man and a woman.

The Mahamrityunjaya mantra, Rigveda 7.59.12, addresses Tryambaka, 'the three-eyed one', an epithet of which god?

Rudra, whom Shaivism identifies with Shiva, is asked to free the worshipper from death 'like a cucumber from its stem', the image behind its name, the mantra that conquers death.

Which chart-topping 1970 George Harrison single is famous for singing the 16-word Hare Krishna mantra?

My Sweet Lord topped charts around the world in 1970–71, and Harrison later stuck a Hare Krishna sticker on the back of Eric Clapton's 1964 Gibson ES-335.

Which Beatles song's refrain is a Sanskrit mantra hailing Guru Dev, the spiritual master of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi?

Across the Universe uses the mantra as the link from each verse into its chorus, John Lennon's tribute meaning 'all glory to Guru Dev', the Maharishi's own guru.

Which 1998 Madonna album includes 'Shanti/Ashtangi', a prayer she sings entirely in Sanskrit?

Ray of Light's 'Shanti/Ashtangi' sets a shloka from the Yoga Taravali to techno, and after errors in her pronunciation surfaced the BBC arranged phone lessons with scholar Vagish Shastri.

In which Kalidasa poem does a banished yaksha ask a passing cloud to carry a love message to his wife?

Meghaduta, 'Cloud Messenger', even has the spirit tell the cloud not to skip Ujjain on its way north to the mythical city of Alaka, detour or not.

Which German poet wrote a 1791 epigram praising Kalidasa's play Shakuntala and echoed its prologue in Faust?

Goethe knew the play through Georg Forster's German rendering of William Jones's 1789 English version, the first Indian drama ever translated into a Western language.

Shudraka's Sanskrit drama about a poor Brahmin and the courtesan Vasantasena is known in English by what title?

The Little Clay Cart, or Mrichchhakatika, fills its acts with gamblers, thieves and courtesans, and a romanticised French version, Le Chariot d'enfant, played Paris in 1850.

Which 7th-century emperor of Kannauj is credited with three Sanskrit plays, among them Ratnavali and Nagananda?

Harsha's Nagananda tells of the bodhisattva Jimutavahana and opens with a verse to the Buddha, fitting for a ruler the pilgrim Xuanzang described as a Buddhist; the third play is Priyadarsika.

Which Western Satrap ruler cut the Junagadh rock inscription of about 150 CE, the first long text in standard Sanskrit?

Rudradaman I's prose on the Girnar rock traces the waterworks of Sudarshana lake back to Chandragupta Maurya's time, yet breaks the sandhi rules of Sanskrit 'no less than 10 times'.

Kalhana's 12th-century Rajatarangini, a rare Sanskrit work of history, chronicles the kings of which region?

Kashmir's dynasties fill the metrical chronicle, and a surviving manuscript of it is written in Sharada, a script long used for Sanskrit in the valley.

The Bower Manuscript, a 5th-century Sanskrit medical text unearthed at Kucha in China, was written on what?

Birch bark in early Gupta script carries its seven treatises, which Lieutenant Hamilton Bower bought in March 1890 while chasing a murderer through Xinjiang.

Which ancient philosopher compiled the Kama Sutra, a Sanskrit guide to living well that is only partly about sex?

Vatsyayana's text runs to 1,250 verses in seven books, covering courtship, the social arts and married life alongside its famous chapter on positions.

Which ancient Sanskrit medical text describes rebuilding a severed nose with a flap of skin from the cheek?

The Sushruta Samhita's operating list also runs to haemorrhoidectomy, amputations, eye surgery, bladder-stone removal and obstetric procedures, all set down in Sanskrit verse and prose.

Pingala's Sanskrit treatise on metre used short and long syllables in a way likened to which signalling system?

Morse code is the comparison scholars draw, since Pingala's binary-like sequences of the two syllable weights, from about the 3rd century BC, even used the word śūnya for zero.

Which Rigveda hymn, the 'Hymn of Creation', ends by doubting whether even the highest overseer knows how it began?

The Nasadiya Sukta, hymn 10.129, opens with 'not the non-existent' and reasons that the gods came after creation, so they may not know either.

Which of the four Vedas is largely a collection of charms, spells and everyday rituals rather than priestly hymns?

The Atharvaveda is sometimes called the 'Veda of magical formulas', and its spells to win a lover or cure a fever sit beside rites for initiation, marriage and funerals.

Veda, 'knowledge', comes from the Sanskrit root vid-, 'to know', making it a cognate of which English word?

Wit shares the Proto-Indo-European root, as do Latin videō, 'I see', Greek idea and Russian védat', 'to know'.

The word Upanishad, from Sanskrit upa and ni-ṣad, came to be understood as describing what scene?

Sitting near a teacher is the image: a student at the master's side receiving spiritual knowledge, though the term originally meant 'connection' or 'equivalence'.

Kutiyattam, a surviving form of Sanskrit theatre that UNESCO recognised in 2001, is performed in which Indian state?

Kerala's temple theatres stage Kutiyattam together with Koothu, and UNESCO listed it in 2001 as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

How many grammatical cases, from nominative through to vocative, can a Sanskrit noun take?

Eight cases, nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative and vocative, combine with three numbers and three genders in every Sanskrit noun.

The name Sanskrit, saṃskṛta, is a compound of sam and kṛta that literally means what?

Perfected, or well-made, is the sense of sáṃ, 'together, good, well', plus kṛta, 'made, formed', a name that set the polished literary language apart from everyday vernaculars.

The Devanagari script's name pairs deva, 'god', with nāgarī, an adjective from nagara that means what?

Urban, or 'of the city', is nāgarī's sense, so the name reads as 'script of the divine city'; unlike Latin letters, Devanagari has no upper and lower case at all.

How many Shiva Sutras, the aphorisms that arrange the sounds of Sanskrit, open Panini's grammar?

Fourteen aphorisms, also called the Maheshvara Sutras, order the phonemes so that Panini can name a whole run of sounds with a single syllable, the pratyahara.

What does the title of Patanjali's Mahabhashya, the 2nd-century BCE classic on Panini's Sanskrit grammar, mean?

Great commentary is mahā-bhāṣya, and the work preserves Katyayana's nearly 1,500 varttika verses on Panini, which survive only through Patanjali's quotations.

Which Indian script do Japan's Shingon and Tendai Buddhists still use to write Sanskrit mantras and seed syllables?

Siddham, called bonji in Japanese, was kept because Chinese characters could not capture the sounds of Sanskrit, and the monk Kūkai carried it to Japan on his return from China in 806.

Bhaskara II's 1150 Sanskrit arithmetic treatise Lilavati is, according to legend, named after whom?

His daughter Lilavati, the story goes, is who the book was written for, after a sinking-cup timer failed and the auspicious hour chosen for her wedding passed unnoticed.

Which extinct Iranian language of the Zoroastrian scriptures counts among Vedic Sanskrit's closest ancient relatives?

Avestan's oldest hymns, the Gathas, are notably similar to the Rigveda, the two having split from a common Indo-Iranian stock before the Indo-Aryans moved into South Asia.

What term names Sanskrit words taken unchanged into Hindi, Marathi and other modern Indian languages?

Tatsama means 'same as that', and such borrowings run through Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Odia, Hindi and Gujarati as well as Dravidian languages like Kannada and Telugu.

Amarasimha's Amarakosha, one of the oldest surviving Sanskrit lexicons, is what kind of reference work?

A thesaurus is what the Amarakosha amounts to: its formal title, Namalinganushasanam, means 'instruction concerning nouns and gender', and its verses were composed to be easily memorised.

Which Indian ministry built a campaign on Atithi Devo Bhava, the Upanishadic Sanskrit line 'the guest is god'?

Tourism launched Atithi Devo Bhava under its broader Incredible India banner to improve how foreign visitors are received, giving an Upanishadic verse a second life as a slogan.