PrefaceThe origin of this dictionary project dates from 1995, when Ireturned after an interval of 23 years to Tanzania, where I hadworked as education officer at Mkwawa Secondary Schoolfor three years. I found that most people's knowledge ofEnglish had greatly deteriorated. Up to then, the only diction-ary available to them was the Oxford Standard English-Swahili Dictionary dating from 1939. As all higher educationin the country is based on teaching aids in English, there wasobviously a great need for a new, up-to-date dictionary. I sawa clear example of the difficulties encountered by studentswhen I visited a hospital in Dares Salaam. The nurses com-plained that they had no possibility of looking up the numer-ous medical terms they came across in the textbooks.The idea then came to me that I might use one of my morerecent English-Norwegian dictionaries, written on a compu-ter, as the basis of an English-Swahili dictionary. The Norwe-gian metalanguage would have to be turned into English, atask I would undertake myself as the rest of the work pro-ceeded. In principle, there should be no great problemsinvolved in substituting Swahili for the Norwegian text -I thought. However, the reality turned out to be different,as I began to realise during a two-month preliminary projectin Dares Salaam in 1997.So, all honour and thanks to the person who after a short timebecame the very pivot of the project, Mary Mbelle, who is awell-known figure in Radio Tanzania and on CEN Television.Even during the trial period of the project in the autumn of1997 it struck me that she was a highly qualified candidate.Without this encouragement in the opening phase I doubtwhether I would have ventured to start the project.Finding suitable candidates to work on the dictionary provedto be far more difficult than I had imagined in advance, andindeed only once since the Oxford Standard English-SwahiliDictionary was published in 1939, has there been an attemptat compiling an English-Swahili Dictionary: the TUKI Eng-lish-Swahili Dictionary compiled and published by the Insti-tute of Kiswahili Research in 1997. It should be mentionedthat the Oxford Standard English-Swahili Dictionary hashitherto been reprinted 58 times in an unrevised edition.