He published several books, notably, A History of Missions and A Comprehensive Tamil and English Dictionary of High and Low Tamil, a Tamil to Englishlexicon which took twenty years of missionary labor to compile sixty-seven thousand Tamil words. This dictionary was based in part on manuscript material of the pastor Joseph Knight, of the London Missionary Society, and the Rev. Samuel Hutchings, of the American mission, and was the most complete dictionary of a modern Indian language published at that time.[1][4][5] The book later become the basis for the more exhaustive Tamil Lexicon dictionary published by the University of Madras in 1924.
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Early life
He was born in Williston, Vermont, on December 11, 1789, to Anna Kellogg and Nathaniel Winslow. At the age of fourteen, he started his career as a store clerk and then established himself in a business in Norwich, Connecticut, where he was employed for two years.[1][4]
On June 8, 1819, he embarked from Boston on the brig Indus, bound for Calcutta, India. From Calcutta, he proceeded to Ceylon and reached his destination on December 14, 1819. As part of his missionary duty, he was initially stationed at Oodooville on July 4, 1820. At Oodooville, he established a mission and a seminary. After having laboured for fourteen years at Oodooville, he was transferred to Madras, South India. Having arrived at Madras on August 18, 1836, he had chosen that as the mission site for the American Madras Mission and started his missionary activities; consequently, Winslow is credited with commencing [founding] the American Madras Mission in 1836. In September 1836, he was joined by John Scudder, Sr., the first American medical missionary in India.[1][2][3][4] In 1839 they were joined by the young missionary printer Phineas R. Hunt who sailed from America to take charge of the mission press.
Winslow visited America in 1855 but returned in 1858. Due to ill health, he left again to America in August 1864; however, he died at the age of seventy-four, on his way from India to America at the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town), South Africa, on 22 October 1864, two days after he reached Cape Town.[1][3]
Bibliography
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During his senior years in the seminary at Andover, he wrote A History of Missions or History of the principal attempt to propagate Christianity among the Heathen, and it was published by Flagg and Gould at Andover in 1819. During his passage from India to America in 1855, he wrote Hints on Missions which had been published by M.W. Dodd in 1856. It is a sort of digest of his experiences and observations during his thirty-seven years of missionary life.[1][4]
In addition to these, he published several of his sermons and addresses as pamphlets. Most of his missionary labors were consumed in translating the Bible into the Tamil language in 1855, especially in the preparation of a Tamil-English lexicon entitled A Comprehensive Tamil and English Dictionary of High and Low Tamil, completed in 1862. Winslow devoted almost three to four hours a day for nearly thirty years to this project. It extends to nearly a thousand quarto pages and contains more than sixty-seven thousand Tamil words. This dictionary has thirty thousand five hundred and fifty-one (31,551) more words than any other dictionary of the Tamil language. The dictionary was so comprehensive, that it included the astronomical, mythological, astrological, scientific, botanical, and official terms, along with names of gods, authors, and heroes—for this, he received the highest encomiums from the Indian and English press like the Madras Observer; the Madras Times; the Colombo Observer-Statesman; the New York Observer; and more, and also from the literary and official press too.[1][4][5]
^ abcdefghiClark, Joseph Sylvester; Dexter, Henry Martyn; Quint, Alonzo Hall; Langworthy, Isaac Pendleton; Cushing, Christopher; Burnham, Samuel (1865). The Congregational quarterly, Volume 7. pp. 209–210. ((cite book)): |work= ignored (help)
