In 2020, we did something very odd. Well, K (Kailash, CTO) did. He helped open-source Alar, a Kannada–English dictionary. It’s a little absurd, considering we’re a stockbroking company, but the project itself is one of monumental importance.

The story of how Alar came to be is even more inspiring. It was essentially the life’s work of one man: V. Krishna. Alar is the online version of what he had built over 40 years—researching, writing, and cataloguing more than 150,000 Kannada words and 240,000 English definitions, complete with all their attendant details. Just thinking about someone spending four decades relentlessly pursuing one single project is beyond inspiring. Oh, and he is still working on adding to the corpus. That Zerodha had even a small role to play in this is deeply gratifying.

It has now been five years since Alar launched, and over two lakh people visit it every month. It also just received a major update, faster than ever. And K has been working on improving dictpress, the underlying open-source technology that powers the creation of online dictionaries includng Alar.

So if, by any chance, you’re obsessed with languages and dictionaries and have been wondering how to build one online, you should definitely check it out.

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