The conviction that it would be useful to have a compilation like the present one emerged in the 1980s during the process of editing Rabgūzī’s Qisas al-Anbiyāʾ. At that time it was clear that the lexicographical tools available were insufficient for addressing Rabgūzī’s language. During that period I had fruitful and encouraging discussions with my esteemed teacher Henri Hofman at the University of Utrecht and Barbara Flemming of the University of Leiden, two eminent scholars well acquainted with the intricacies of Middle Turkic studies. As it turned out, I only really found time to complete work on the dictionary after my retirement. Over the years I have received help and encouragement from a number of colleagues. Without their help I could not have succeeded. Even quite early on, my cooperation with Semih Tezcan of Bamburg University improved my ability to deal with so vast an amount of lexical materials. And then discussions with Lázlo Károly were essential for establishing the work on a sound methodological footing and for the acquisition of background knowledge of the sources. He also helped me with the digital programming. And it would have been impossible for me to solve many problems to do with Arabic terms in the wordlists and phrasebooks without assistance from Mohammad Rashed of the University of Mainz. And Keyvan Dehgan, from the same university, was a great help with the treatment of Persian materials. Then from the Slavic Department, Björn Wiemer sorted out the Slavonic items. Likewise while the work was still in progress, I consulted Klaus Röhrborn of Göttingen University and profited from his valuable feedback and encouragement. Then in the final stage, Robert Dankoff made numerous useful suggestions as reviewer on behalf of the publishers. Éva Kinces-Nagy from the University of Szeged corrected my mistakes in matters to do with Mongolian and she kindly took the trouble to make corrections in the final version.
During the last two years of intense cooperation, John O’Kane went to work on the task of correcting the English. But, even more importantly, he also checked the Arabic and Persian quotations. He convinced me to present these in a normalized form. Thus he has helped to shape the dictionary in an essential way.