As regards derivation, the lexicon is most mischievous. Almost all the most important Tamil words are shown to be of Sanskrit origin by means of tendentious and absurd etymologies.

     All native Sanskrit dictionaries unanimously declare their contents to be exclusively of Aryan origin, though 46% of them at least are either Tamil words or their derivatives. The Sanskritists have been notorious impostors from the very beginning, claiming celestial descent for themselves and divine origin for their ancestral language and literary dialect. This is not surprising, as it is quite characteristic of them. But it is astonishing, that a western professor like Monier Williams should have been so blind and gullible, as to base his Sanskrit-English Dictionary entirely on the native Lexicons without any scrutiny whatever. It was this work that emboldened the editors of the Tamil Lexicon, to derive from Sanskrit as many Tamil words as they liked, in utter disregard of the golden principles framed by Dr. Caldwell.

     To connect the Tamil word aiyan, a name of kinship of native origin, with ƒrya, a racial name of foreign origin, is arbitrary and absurd in the extreme. ‘Aiyan’ is a genuine Tamil word primarily meaning ‘a great one’. On the basis of this idea, it came to signify God, a king or chief, a hermit, a teacher, one's father, one's elder brother, a senior and so on. Every aged and respectable man is addressed aiyƒ, the vocative of ‘aiyan’. There are several pure-blooded Tamilian castes including the lowest, hereditarily employing the word aiyan to denote the male parent.

     ‘Aiyan’ is derived from ‘ai’ whose primary meaning is greatness.

     ‘Accan’ a corruption of ‘attan’, is another Tamil word meaning ‘a father’ and meeting with the same fate of having been derived from ‘Arya’ through the Prakrit word ajja’.

      Vari, ‘tax’, lit. ‘that which is tied up’, is derived from bal, which means ‘an oblation or sacrifice’ and has nothing to do with taxation at all. What is worse is, that this derivation is singularly chosen as a mark of excellence of the Lexicon.