Arvind Kumar (lexicographer)

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Arvind Kumar (17 January 1930 – 26 April 2021) was an Indian journalist, art-drama-film critic, short story writer, translator, and lexicographer. He created Samantar Kosh, the first thesaurus in Hindi or any modern Indian language, published in 1996. He also produced The Penguin English-Hindi/Hindi-English Thesaurus & Dictionary in 2007, a three-volume bilingual dictionary with about 2.8 million words.

Kumar began his career in the Delhi printing industry at age 15. He earned a BA in 1953 and an MA in English in 1955 from Panjab University. He served as Executive Editor for Delhi Press magazines Sarita, Mukta, and Caravan (1953–1963). He founded Madhuri, The Times of India group’s Hindi film magazine (1963–1978), and later launched Sarvottam, the Hindi edition of Reader’s Digest (1980–1985).

In 1996, he presented the first copy of Samantar Kosh to the President of India. In 2011, he launched Arvind Lexicon, an online database with over one million English-Hindi expressions. He wrote many other lexicographic works, including Arvind Sahaj Samantar Kosh, Shabdeshwari, Brihat Samantar Kosh, Arvind Word Power, and Arvind Tukant Kosh. His autobiography, ShabdVedh, appeared in 2016.

Kumar was married to Kusum Kumar and had two children, Sumeet Kumar and Meeta Lall. Meeta runs Arvind Linguistics, and Sumeet helped computerize the lexicon projects. He died in New Delhi on 26 April 2021 from COVID-19 complications at age 91. A documentary about his life, Thesaurus Man – Arvind Kumar, was released in 2023.