The McAlpin Core Vocabulary for Tamil app is a fulltext searchable version of David W. McAlpin's "A core vocabulary for Tamil," rev. ed. Philadelphia, Pa.: Dept. of South Asia Regional Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1981. It is a product of the Digital South Asia Library program (http://dsal.uchicago.edu) at the University of Chicago (http://www.uchicago.edu).

The McAlpin Tamil dictionary app can be used both online and offline. The online version interacts with a database that runs remotely on a server at the University of Chicago. The offline version uses a database that is created on the Android device upon first download.