confusion arises because the page heading words may refer to any of the first three levels of alphabetical order: if the word sought is not quickly found on the expected page, then examine the heading words a few pages before and after. If the word is still not found, then examine entries at the next level of alphabetical order, until finally at the outermost devanagarT level. 14.5 Difficult Words Some words, because of their etymological development, are just plain difficult to find. When you have exhausted all the tricks that you know with the dictionary (see sections 12.5, 13.7, and 14.4), then consider the following: (a) If it is a short word (one or two syllables) then it may not be listed in the dictionary at all: the declension of pronouns, for example, is irregular and the only recourse is to lists of paradigms. (b) If it has three or more syllables, treat it as a samasa and use the sandhi rules to split it into parts at every syllable — this process may seem rather laborious, but it does get there if the word is listed in the dictionary. This detective work is illustrated with two words: Yatatman — The word is not found as a samasa under *T or *TcT, and there is no entry word Yata. So let's split the word at a: we could have yata-atman, yata-atman, yata-atman, or yata-atman. The first two don't help because we have already found that there is no entry word Yata — but there is an entry word
- TcT. Don't get excited: it is a guess and could be wrong. Nevertheless, following
this clue to page 845 we find Yatatman in the third column — who would have guessed that it came from dhatu yam? Svadhyaya — Having worked our way to the devanagarT level of alphabetical order, we find the closest entry is "WIhM, but reading the text for that entry we find 'svadhyaya, see pl277, col. 2.' And indeed there we find two entries: the first as a noun and the second as a verb. Alternatively we could have tried splitting the word ourselves, working from the left again, to produce su-adhyaya, su-adhyaya, sva-dhyaya, sva-adhyaya, sva- adhyaya, sva-adhyaya, or sva-adhyaya. Having found nothing useful under ^T (five entries) or ^T (four entries) or "Wl, we would have arrived at ^ and thus find the entries in 1277b. However, this is not the end of the story: we want to find the dhatu from which
