Making a bilingual dictionary involves frustration and compromise. You set out with the cheerful view that you can produce a work that will be all things to all men -and perhaps to all machines; you end up with a feeling that you are failing one and all. You want to make a dictionary that will be concise but exhaustive; exact while not exacting; linguistically adequate for both languages, yet uncluttered with trivial details. Sooner or later you have to concentrate on certain goals and forget others. Each dictionary represents some unique compromise, useful - we hope - for some purposes and frustrating for others. The more we seem to advance in the development of dictionaries, the more we need to aim at reducing the points of frustration which often confront the lexicographer who compiles the dictionary and the user who refers to it. Unfortunately, existing Arabic-English dictionaries have not caught up with modem developments in bilingual dictionaries which involve English and other (European) languages.