Hailing from a farming background, Sunil in fact is the first generation in his family to be educated. Due to poor conditions at home, Sunil’s parents could not afford sending their children to an English medium school. “After finishing my schooling in Nasik, I went to Ahmadnagar for further education. Like most of the vernacular medium children, I couldn’t grasp what the professors were teaching as the language of communication for higher studies was English. That is the time that I started jotting down the words that I felt were difficult to understand,” said Khandbahale.

A list that started at that time gathered more than 18,000 words by the year 1997 when Khandbahale finished his engineering. Though the list continued growing for Khandbahale’s personal use, it was not until year 2000 that he decided to make it into a dictionary. “There are many English-to-English dictionaries. What our children need is an English-Marathi dictionary,” said Khandbahale who by the year 2000 had collected more than 4,00,000 words.

“We released our first dictionary in the year 2000 in the form of a CD and it drew wonderful response,” he said describing the journey from 2000 to 2008.

“What we had to date was the CD upgrade of the same dictionary. This time we are all set to release the first ever online English-Marathi and Marathi-English dictionary. It will benefit not only to the Marathi speaking people but also the ones who want to learn Marathi,” he said.

The dictionary is compatible with other operating systems like Linux and Symbian.

Khandbahale is also aware of the importance and accessibility of mobile phones. “This dictionary can also be accessed on mobile phones, laptops and palmtops,” he said.