ஒளியோன்
Oliyon, the one who is light
Oliyon Research builds free, openly licensed tools for scholars, researchers, teachers and anyone who works with the Tamil language: a living nigandu of words and their meanings, and a studio for making Tamil fonts. Made in Chennai, kept for the long term.
Oliyon Research is the research arm of the Oliyon group, a family-owned group of ventures from Chennai. Where the group's other arms work in food, learning and media, Oliyon Research has one job: to build and maintain reference tools for the Tamil language and its literature, and to keep them free.
We take our name from the Tamil word for the bearer of light. The tools here are meant to carry light into old texts: the Siddhar songs, the classical corpus, the living vocabulary of everyday Tamil. Word data is released under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence, the tools carry no advertising, and nothing here is for sale.
Scholars and readers add to the collection; a reviewer checks each entry before it is published. We would rather grow slowly and be right than grow fast and be doubted.
Each tool lives at its own address under oliyonresearch.com, with its own sign-in. Both are in development; the first releases open to invited scholars before the public.
Nigandu — a Tamil thesaurus and encyclopaedia
Look up a word and find its synonyms, its senses and where it appears, with references drawn from the Siddhar songs and the classical texts. One word, its many names, side by side.
Anyone can read. Registered contributors can add words and entries; each one is reviewed before it is listed. The whole corpus is free to reuse under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Suzhi — a Tamil font studio
Draw your own letterforms, build a complete font covering the Tamil script with digits and punctuation, and use it on your own site, app or press. Named for the first curl of the pen.
Keep a font private, or share it so others can install it. Free for personal and scholarly use; there is no marketplace and nothing to buy.
More tools will follow. If there is a reference you wish existed for your own work, tell us on the enquiry page; the best ideas so far have come from people who use these texts every day.
Reading never needs an account. The data is openly licensed, so a scholar, a school or another project can take it and build on it.
Contributions are welcome and every one is checked by a reviewer who knows the source. What you read here has been looked at twice.
Simple software on steady foundations, with the data always exportable. The aim is a reference that is still here in thirty years.
Contribute entries to the nigandu, review submissions in your field, bring a text or a word list you would like preserved, or propose a tool you need. Write to us at connect@oliyon.in or use the enquiry page; we reply within two working days.