The idea of creating a concise and relatively inexpensive Akkadian-English dictionary was conceived in 1989 by Nicholas Postgate. It was plain from the start that it would need to be based on the Akkadisches Handworterbuch (AHw) of W. von Soden, who gave the scheme his blessing in the autumn of that year. From the start Jeremy Black and Andrew George agreed to collaborate in the venture, and in the course of the work we received considerable assistance from other colleagues with Assyriological experience. Although the three Editors have undertaken different proportions of the work, decisions on the dictionary's content and presentation were made collectively. Our procedure was first to produce a drastically abbreviated English translation of AHw, letter by letter. This was then checked against AHw by a second collaborator. To reduce the risk of misunderstandings of AHw's intentions either the first or the second stage was done in each case by a native German-speaker (Tina Breckwoldt, Marie-Christine Ludwig or Cornelia Wunsch). Each letter has been processed at some stage by at least one of the principal Editors. During or after the first stage the provisional text of each letter was word-processed, and the next major stage was the inclusion of corrections and additions. These came from various sources, including the addenda and corrigenda of AHw itself. The principal concern was to take full advantage of the material in the encyclopaedic Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD), now almost complete, wherever this amplified or corrected AHw. Further to this the reviews of both dictionaries in the Assyriological literature were initially harvested by Clemens Reichel, but for each letter responsibility for the difficult task of harmonizing or adjudicating between AHw and CAD where they diverged rested with one of the Editors. There followed a long period during which the complete text was subjected to various editorial and typographical refinements, as well as philological revision and correction.