Monier Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary entry for vimāna

Record summary

Monier Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary, published in 1899, records meanings and textual associations for terms including vimāna. Its treatment is a useful control against later claims that the word uniformly meant a mechanical aircraft. The dictionary reflects nineteenth-century Indological scholarship and draws on Sanskrit literary and religious sources, allowing researchers to examine semantic range, citations and translation conventions. It is not evidence of an encounter, but it can clarify how words later mobilized in UFO narratives were understood in a scholarly reference work close to the period.