Digital South Asia Library — Molesworth's A Dictionary, Marathi and English (1857), अभिमान entry

Author: J. T. Molesworth, revised and enlarged by Thomas Candy (original compilation), digitized by the Digital South Asia Library (DSAL), University of Chicago
Publication: A Dictionary, Marathi and English, 2nd ed., Bombay, 1857 — digitized/searchable edition hosted by DSAL
Date: 1857 (original); accessed 2026-09-06
URL: https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/molesworth_query.py?qs=अभिमान&searchhws=yes&matchtype=exact (query interface at https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/molesworth/)
Type: primary (a 19th-century Marathi-English lexicographic dictionary, digitized and directly queried) — neutral, lexicographic
Accessed: 2026-09-06

Extract

The entry for अभिमान (abhimāna) gives as its primary sense "Pride, haughtiness, conceit, opinionativeness," with related verbal forms.
A second sense: "Conscious feeling towards [something]; apprehension or view of as self, or as belonging to or connected with self" — described as maintaining or holding a matter "with engagedness of heart and soul."
A third sense covers claims, pretensions, or professions of merit.
Compound examples given include देशाभिमान (patriotism/national pride), कुलाभिमान (family pride), and मताभिमान (opinionated attachment to one's own views).
The entry states the word "corresponds well with our words Honor, proper pride, lofty sense of propriety, noble feeling" — i.e. glossing the word's positive-valence range alongside its negative (haughtiness/conceit) one.
No sense of sulking, hurt feelings toward a loved one, pique, or grievance appears anywhere in the entry. This is the oldest and most authoritative primary dictionary source consulted by this project for any of abhiman's three attested languages (Hindi, Bengali, Odia), and it shows the same pattern already confirmed for Hindi: pride/ego/self-regard senses only, no trace of the modern Bengali/Odia relational-hurt sense.

Retrieved via a WebFetch summarization pass rather than a raw-HTML read; the compound examples and closing "Honor..." gloss are consistent across two independent fetches of the same query and corroborated by a second, independent secondary aggregation of the same dictionary (see transliteral.org), which mitigates but does not eliminate this project's standing WebFetch-synthesis caution.
A single 19th-century dictionary's coverage; a modern Marathi dictionary was not independently consulted by this record alone (see the companion check at transliteral.org, which aggregates a modern Maharashtra Shabdakosh entry, a Marathi synonyms dictionary, and Marathi WordNet, all corroborating).