Sanskrit words

Sanskrit words have an appealing sound and often convey a deep spiritual meaning. You may know many of these words already. These words are among those used as examples for practice with reading and pronunciation of Sanskrit script in the DVD "Gateway to Sanskrit".

	om
	yoga
	inner breath or life energy
	dharma duty, law, justice, character or merit
	coiled energy,represented by a sleeping snake
	karma yoga the yoga of selfless action
	mantra a sound to steady the mind for meditation
	seed (A 'seed mantra' may be used as an aid to meditation.)
	symbolic circular design to aid in meditation
	virtuous
	scholar
	liberation
	great vows (In the Yoga Sutras this refers to the five yamas.)
	energy channels in the body
	shakti energy, power or ability
	mukti liberation or freedom
	thread or verse
	peace
	siddhi an extraordinary power or perfection.
	guru

This is a sample of the Sanskrit words used as learning examples on the "Devanagari: Gateway to Sanskrit" DVD or video.

It's amazing how many English and Sanskrit words sound alike.

This means 'tooth', and sounds like 'dental'.

Sanskrit and English words may sound alike when both languages preserved the original word with little change. These are called 'cognate' words. Or some words sound alike just by coincidence. Sometimes it's hard to know which is which and scholars debate over this.

This means either 'bear or 'star' in Sanskrit. In Latin this is ursus for 'bear' and Ursa Major and Ursa Minor for the constelation names. So one likely explanation for why the Sanskrit word would mean both 'bear' and 'star' is that even in pre-historic times people were already naming those constellations in that way! In Greek this word became arktos meaning 'bear', leading to the word Arctic in English. Also in Celtic it became arto meaning 'bear' which led to the name Arthur.