The material in this dictionary is derived from two sources: almost the entire contents of W. Freeman's A Concise Dictionary of English Idioms, (Hodder and Stoughton) have been used; this has been heavily supplemented by additions from the more recent Longman's Dictionary of English Idioms. There are also a few borrowings and illustrations from the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English. As this is a learner's, rather than a reference, dictionary, we did not seek after comprehensiveness. We were consequently faced with the difficult task of selection which we carried out employing rather a vague, but, we are almost certain, pragmatically valid, criterion. We had to depend on our collective intuition as experienced teachers of English language and literature in order to select what we thought are most frequent idioms which would at the same time prove most useful to our students in the Arab World. We hope we have not missed much in this area.