an ancient language of India, the language of the Vedas, of Hinduism, and of an extensive philosophical and scientific literature dating from the beginning of the first millennium bc. It is the oldest recorded member of the Indic branch of the Indo-European family of languages; recognition of the existence of the Indo-European family arose in the 18th century from a comparison of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin. Although it is used only for religious purposes, it is one of the official languages of India

the classical Old Indic literary language, as cultivated from the 4th cent. b.c. onward: because of the antiquity of its written expression and the detailed descriptive analysis it received in the Sutras of the Hindu grammarian Pānini (end of the 4th cent. b.c.), Sanskrit was used as a major source of data in the origin and development of Indo-European comparative linguistics

any written form of Old Indic, including Vedic

of or written in Sanskrit