James Thomas Molesworth (1795 – 13 July 1871) was a military officer in the services of the British East India Company, and one of the most prominent lexicographers of the Marathi language.
The work was simultaneously carried out for a Marathi-Marathi and a Marathi-English dictionary, (republished in 1970s by Sharad Gogate's Shubhada - Saraswat Prakashan) with the assistance of the twin brothers George and Thomas Candy, and a team of native Marathi-speaking Brahmins.
A preface to the first edition of the Marathi-English dictionary describes the process as follows: We employed Brahmans in several quarters of the Maratha territory to collect words, phrases and proverbs.
We obtained, after all rejections under the heads of repetition, corruption, unsuitableness (from being too learned, too low, of too obvious signification, of too recent or too confined adoption, etc etc), above twenty-five thousand words…Of every word, in its order, [the Brahmans] investigated the grammatical designation, the derivation, the orthography, the gender, the meanings primitive and figurative, the applications regular and popular, the currency whether general or local… The points settled were written down instantly in Marathi and English; ... and all the materials were removed, and reserved for another hand.
[In another department of our work], in a private and quiet room... [we] sat to cull out of books, and letters, and petitions, every useful word, every new meaning, every fresh idiom, every remarkable application, every requisite authority.