Read Urdu - Devanagari & English Meanings

About

Read Urdu online without knowing the script.

Read Urdu turns any Urdu word on the web into its Devanagari reading and an English gloss — with one double-click. If you can read Hindi but not Nastaliq or Naskh, this bridges the gap.

WHAT IT DOES
• Double-click any Urdu word on any webpage
• A tooltip appears with:
   – the word in Devanagari (Hindi script) so you can read it
   – a concise English meaning
   – a Hindi meaning where available
• Works on both Nastaliq (poetry sites) and Naskh (news sites like BBC Urdu, Al Jazeera Urdu)

WHY IT EXISTS
Millions of people can read Hindi but not Urdu, even though the two languages share about 70% of vocabulary. Urdu literature — from Ghalib and Faiz to modern journalism — becomes accessible with the right transliteration.

FEATURES
• 63,000+ entries covering classical and modern Urdu
• Handles inflected forms (plurals, oblique cases, verb conjugations) automatically
• Solid compound prefixes (بے-, نا-) resolved via base word
• Optional miss log — export words the dictionary didn't cover, so you can grow it
• Per-site blocklist for pages where you don't want it active
• Fully offline — the dictionary is bundled; nothing phones home

PRIVACY
No accounts. No analytics. No servers contacted. No reading history collected. The extension processes the double-clicked word entirely locally in your browser. See the About page for details.

DICTIONARY SOURCES
• Platts (1884), Fallon (1879), Shakespear (1834) — public-domain Hindustani-English dictionaries via the Digital South Asia Library at the University of Chicago
• Wiktionary Urdu and Hindi extracts (CC BY-SA 4.0) via kaikki.org
• Wikidata proper-noun labels (CC0)

The composite dictionary is released under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Open source: github.com/rohan-c0de/ReadUrdu-Devanagari-English
Privacy policy: rohan-c0de.github.io/ReadUrdu-Devanagari-English/PRIVACY.html