Dear reader, My name is Laksh Patel. This wordlist began at our family table, where the talk would drift between Gujarati and the Kutchi words my grandparents used without ceremony: the name of a small tool, a way to slice something, a nickname you only hear when someone is truly close. I noticed how easily those little words slip away—first from speech, then from memory—until you reach for them and there is nothing to catch.

I started writing them down. At first it was scraps: the backs of wall calendars, a shop receipt, the margin of a school notebook. Later it became a habit. On visits to relatives, in markets and workshops, I would ask “What do you call this?” and wait—because sometimes a word arrives with a story. I wrote the words in clear Gujarati script so anyone in the family could point and read. Some came from trips across Kutch—Bhuj, Mandvi, Anjar, Mundra, Lakhpat, Nakhatrana, and Rapar—some from kitchen conversations, some from the labels people make themselves and tape to jars or tools. A surprising number were found in ordinary places: a chalk mark on a sack, the side of a crate, a note tucked into an old book.

About script and orality. Kutchi is often treated as a purely verbal language in daily life—carried in voices, not on paper. There isn’t one standard, universally agreed script for it. For this wordlist I chose to transcribe Kutchi in Gujarati letters because that script is already familiar and practical for families and schools in Kutch. Think of these spellings as phonetic guides that hold the sound long enough to teach, print, and share. They are not declarations of “the one correct orthography,” and local pronunciations are welcome alongside them.

My grandparents taught me that words don’t live in books; they live in uses. A term for બંધણી (bandhani) knots or a word for a salt-pan wind isn’t just a noun—it’s a memory of hands at work, a sequence of steps, a season. That is why this is a written source and not a performance: so the words can be held still long enough for a child to learn them as they are, and for a teacher to copy them to a board without second-guessing the spelling.

I keep the list simple—headwords you can trust on the page, plain meanings, and a focus on everyday life: kinship, food, tools and craft, plants and landscape, seasons and market speech. Where Kutchi brushes against Gujarati or Sindhi, I try to show the touchpoint without letting the Kutchi word disappear under it. The hope is practical: that families can print a page, that a festival stall can build a small poster in an hour, that a classroom can make a word wall that feels like home.

How to read this list. Read the headword as you would Gujarati, and let pronunciation bend toward local Kutchi speech. If your household says a word differently, use the space beside the headword to pencil your version—we can keep both. When you share a correction, please include the headword and where you learned the variant (family, village, workplace, bazaar).

People sometimes ask where I “got” the words. The truest answer is: from family and neighbors, from the work they do, and from the quiet labels they leave behind. My role is to listen, to notice, and to keep the spelling steady. If you see something that can be said better, please write and tell me the headword you mean. I’ll listen. Every time someone points to a word here and uses it, the language holds a little tighter.

With care,
Laksh Patel
Curator, Kutchilect

You are welcome to print this page and share it with family or students.