I agree with Venkatesh. I have not seen any other Tamil dictionary, but Pals covers almost all the basics in Tamil. I have the CD version and that too it was given free by BSNL to its Broadband customes (padikara kalathulaye dictionary vanginathu kidayathu, ippo yaaru kasu kuduthu dictionary vangarathu).
But Madras university publication, Tamil Lexicon is the master of all, I suppose. In 6 huge volumes, the lexicon costs just Rs.600 or so. That too with the 50% off (is the offer still on?) for Rs.300 its real good deal. I wanted to buy this for long, but have been delaying for two reasons...
1. Lack of place to keep such huge volumes :( 2. Am I so knowledgable in tamil to have such huge lexicon to refer???
There are lots of online dictionaries/lexicon available. Cologne university has a very good Tamil and Sanskrit online lexicon. search for 'online tamil lexicon' and you get very good links.
So for my needs Pals and online lexicon suffices :)
I have the full database of Madras University Tamil words (which I think is what is used in Cologne university online search) in electronic format, in SqlLite 3.0 format and MS Access format... have even created a project in sourceforge to distribute this, along with a small user interface program to query... some more data corrections are to be made. Lack of time + lots of personal issues, the database sleeping in my system over the past 2 years.
As regards Tamil Dictionary the one called "Na. Kathiraiver Pillai Thamizh Mozhi Agaradhi" is a good one and is priced at about Rs.500/- Yeah there are a few online lexicons too that are good. I downloaded one dictionary and have it in the following address
It is in openoffice ods format. I chose this format because of the size of the file. the microsoft excel version of the same file is about 6 times huge. You need to download the openoffice software from http://www.openoffice.org
Are not these a list of words taken from Madras University Lexicon? I remember the Thamizha Developer team prepared some such list for aspell software for Tamil spellcheck feature.