The Braille edition of Hemkosh’, the first etymological dictionary of the Assamese language, has entered the Guinness World Records, an official said on Monday.
The official certificate recognising ‘Hemkosh’ as the world’s largest bilingual Braille dictionary was handed to its publisher Jayanta Baruah by the official adjudicator for Guinness World Records, Rishi Nath on Monday in the present of Assam Governor Gulab Chand Kataria.
The official letter was presented at a ceremony coinciding with the 127th death anniversary of Hemchandra Baruah.
Hemchandra Baruah had compiled the Hemkosh’ in the last part of the 19th century.
The confirmation of the recognition was received by the publisher on April 24 through an email.
The seminal work was first published in 1919, four years after Baruah’s demise. Subsequent editions of the dictionary were published and the 15th edition is currently under production, its members said.
The dictionary is considered to be the standard reference of Assamese orthography, which is the set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word boundaries, emphasis and punctuation.
The braille edition is the adaption of Hemkosh’s 14th edition of the regular dictionary and is an Assamese and English one. It has 90,640 words printed in 21 volumes and are divided into six parts, comprising a total 10,279 pages and weighing 80.800 kg, a release said.
