KARACHI, April 6: The Urdu Lughat Board has published the 19th volume of the Urdu Lughat after a gap of almost two years. The last volume came out in June 2002.

The president of the Urdu Lughat Board, Dr Farman Fatehpuri, said the 19th volume consisted of 994 pages and contained about 10,000 words, idioms, phrases and proverbs. He added that the first and last words of the volume were Minha and Nishapur, respectively.

The Urdu Lughat Board plans to publish 22 volumes containing 300,000 words, give or take a few hundred words. He said the work on the 22 volumes of the Urdu Lughat would be completed within a couple of years. He said that a few copies of the 19th volume of the Urdu Lughat had been sent to the ministry of education.

He said the work on the 19th volume of the Lughat was completed under the editorship of Rauf Parekh who had joined the Urdu Lughat Board in July 2003. He observed that Mr Parekh was not only very intelligent and well-read but also very diligent.

In a prefatory note to the 19th volume of the Lughat, Mr Parekh gives credit to his predecessor, Younus Hasni, for doing a great deal of work for the current volume of the dictionary before his retirement.

Mr Fatehpuri said that many small dictionaries would be spin- offs from the 22-volume Urdu Lughat. "The Urdu Lughat Board will publish a two-volume concise dictionary, a junior school dictionary, a high school dictionary, a dictionary of sociology, a dictionary of medicine, etc. The Urdu Lughat Board will undertake these projects after the completion of the main dictionary," he said.

Though the initial work of the Urdu Lughat Board - enunciation of guiding principles for Urdu lexicography, establishment of a well-stocked library, provision of books, appointment of scholars and staff, etc - began in 1958, the first volume of the Urdu Lughat came out in 1967.

The Urdu Lughat Board has modelled its flagship dictionary on the Greater Oxford Dictionary. When completed, the Urdu Lughat would enable the Urdu language to join the exalted ranks of English and German, which are the only two languages in the world to have such comprehensive dictionaries.

At least seven venerable scholars of the Urdu language worked at the Urdu Lughat Board as chief editor. They were the late Dr Maulvi Abdul Haq (from 1957 to 1961), the late Dr Abul Lais Siddiqui (from 1962 to 1984), Dr Farman Fatehpuri (from 1985 to 1995), Dr Hanif Qureishi Fauq (from 1995 to 1997), Prof Sahar Ansari (from 1998 to 2000), Mirza Nasim Baig (from 2000 to 2001) and Dr Younus Hasni (from 2001 to 2003). Currently, Dr Rauf Parekh is working as chief editor of the Urdu Lughat Board.

Fifty-four people work for the Urdu Lughat Board, including 19 editorial staff. The library of the board contains about 15,000 books, including some rare volumes and manuscripts. In addition, the library possesses the first editions of all the classics of Urdu literature.