Charles Rockwell Lanman (July 8, 1850 – February 20, 1941) was an American scholar of the Sanskrit language.

His mother died when he was three years old, and his aunt Abigail (Abby) Trumbull Lanman helped raise him.

[1] At age ten, a young Charles Lanman read a copy of the Journal of the American Oriental Society containing a translation of a textbook of Hindu astronomy, which sparked his interest in Sanskrit.

[2] He also studied Sanskrit under Weber and Roth and philology under Georg Curtius and August Leskien in Germany (1873–1876).

Professor Lanman spent his sabbatical year with his new wife in India on a one-year honeymoon.

[citation needed] As he travelled across India in 1889 he bought for Harvard University some 500 Sanskrit and Prakrit books and manuscripts, which, with those subsequently bequeathed to the university by Fitzedward Hall, make the most valuable collection of its kind in America, and made possible the Harvard Oriental Series, edited by Lanman.

[3][4] Upon their return from India in 1890, the Lanmans built a home at 9 Farrar Street in Cambridge where he lived until his death.