Sanskrit asana names are not labels. They are compounds, built from a small vocabulary that recombines: adho (downward) + mukha (face) + svana (dog) + asana (pose). Learn 259 words and you can read almost any name on a studio schedule, including ones you have never seen.
So this page takes the vocabulary apart and hands it back as parts you can pick from. Every pose name here is composed from its morphemes rather than typed, and the build refuses to publish if any of them fails to come back out.
Almost every asana name ends in asana, “seat”. What comes before it is a stack of ordinary words — a direction, a body part, an animal, sometimes a sage. Once you can see the seams, the names stop being vocabulary to memorize and start being sentences to read.
| Pose | Words | Parts |
|---|---|---|
| Adho Mukha Svanasana Downward-Facing Dog | 3 | adho downward + mukha face + svana dog + asana seat |
| Pascimottanasana Seated Forward Fold | 1 | pascima west + ut up + tana stretch + asana seat |
| Ardha Uttanasana Half Forward Fold | 2 | ardha half + ut up + tana stretch + asana seat |
| Ardha Matsyendrasana Half Lord of the Fishes | 2 | ardha half + matsya fish + indra Indra + asana seat |
| Marichyasana Marichi's Pose | 1 | marichi Marichi + asana seat |
| Dhanurasana Bow | 1 | dhanus bow + asana seat |
Sanskrit fuses vowels where two pieces meet. This is sandhi, and it applies inside a written word and never across a space — which is the whole reason the same two morphemes give two different spellings.
Ardha Uttanasana keeps its space, so nothing happens.
Pascimottanasana is one word, so a + u collapses to o
and pascima + uttana comes out as pascimottana. People who
know both words still fail to recognize the compound, and that is why.
The same rule quietly hides a title inside a pose most people take as one
word: matsya (fish) + indra (lord) → matsyendra, by
a + i → e. Ardha Matsyendrasana is “half lord-of-the-fishes
pose”, named for a man.
Published catalogues are far larger than this one — Daniel Lacerda’s runs to 2,100 entries. That sounds like a vocabulary problem and it is not. The pose list grows by recombination; the word list barely grows at all.
Take a genuinely obscure one: Prapada Baddha Pada Eka Pada Viparita Dandasana. Seven words, and the only one a beginner has not already met is prapada, the ball of the foot — which is itself just pra (forth) + pada (foot). The rest is bound, foot, one, foot, inverted, staff, seat. The pose is rare. Nothing in its name is.
That is the bet this page makes: learn the 259 words and the long tail reads itself. Where it fails, it fails because a word is genuinely missing, and the decoder will tell you which one rather than guessing.
Pick words. The name assembles itself through the sandhi rules, the gloss follows, and if the result happens to be a pose that exists you get the figure too. If it is not a pose, you get an honest blank rather than an invented body.
The other direction. Type any asana name — however your studio spells it — and it gets taken apart. The search runs the composition backwards, so it can also break down names that are not in the pose list at all.
All 259 of them. Roughly a hundred and fifty words is the whole working vocabulary of asana naming, which is less than a week of a language class and considerably more useful on a mat.
218 poses, every one of them composed from the vocabulary above and checked against the spelling studios actually use. All of them are drawn, as joint coordinates rather than pictures.
11 of the 218 entries are 5 shapes wearing more than one name. They are drawn with identical coordinates rather than nudged apart to look like separate poses, because they are not separate poses.
Kumbhakasana = Phalakasana = Utthita Chaturanga Dandasana · Setu Bandha Sarvangasana = Setu Bandhasana · Parivrtta Utkatasana = Parsva Utkatasana · Ardha Pincha Mayurasana = Makara Adho Mukha Svanasana · Devyasana = Utkata Konasana
This is what a naming system does when several schools describe the same thing and none of them defers. A plank is a held breath to one tradition, a board to another, and an extended four-limbed staff to a third; the body does not care which. Counting names is not counting poses, and any catalogue running to four figures is partly counting names.
Everything above runs in one direction: a name arrives and gets taken apart. Run it the other way and the vocabulary starts producing names nobody typed — and for some of them, a figure nobody drew.
The rules will happily build Hasta Janu Tadasana. It parses, it glosses, it even draws — and no one teaches it. — names come out of 218 poses crossed with the operations, and the honest status of nearly all of them is grammatical, not attested.
So they are not in the pose list, and they are not counted as poses. This is a window onto the space the vocabulary can reach, which is a different claim and a smaller one.
Two small tables do all the work on this page. The first is vowel sandhi: what happens when a word ending in a vowel meets a word starting with one, inside a single written word.
| Meeting | Becomes | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| a + a | a | vrksa + asana → vrksasana |
| a + i | e | rare in asana names; included for completeness |
| a + u | o | pascima + uttana → pascimottana |
| a + e | ai | rare |
| a + o | au | rare |
| i + a | ya | marichi + asana → marichyasana |
| i + u | yu | mukti + uttana → muktyuttana |
| u + a | va | rare |
The second is romanization. There is no standard, so the same sound gets written several ways, and this is most of why one pose appears under six spellings across six schedules. Everything on this page normalizes through here before matching.
| Written | Read as |
|---|---|
| sh | s |
| ch | c |
| ee | i |
| oo | u |
| ou | au |
| w | v |
| vri | vr |
| kulp | gulph |
| pica | pinca |
It is a working model, not a grammar. Real sandhi operates on sounds and vowel length, and the romanization here throws both away — so a handful of names are handled by recording an irregular combining form rather than by deriving it. Dhanurasana is the clearest case: the stem is dhanus, the final s becomes r before a vowel, and that r is the only reason the pose is not Dhanvasana.
Where a name resists composition it was left out rather than forced. The test for inclusion was mechanical: compose it from its parts, compare against the spelling studios use, and if they disagree, the entry does not ship.