Since the appearance of the first edition of this book, the range of Spanish-language reference material has been transformed by a significant number of welcome additions and developments. Larger and more comprehensive Spanish/English bilingual dictionaries, based on huge electronic corpora and incorporating much information on register usage, have been published by Collins, Oxford University Press and Larousse; the CLAVE Diccionario del uso del español (Madrid: Ediciones SM) has brought the illustration of word meaning through contextual example to a fine art; substantial on-line corpora have been made available by the Real Academia Española (www.rae.es) and by Professor Mark Davies (www.corpusdelespanol.org), and the presence of Spanish on the Internet provides a wealth of linguistic information. We enthusiastically commend such rich resources. However, the purpose of this book remains what it was, that of providing a selective guide to areas of Spanish usage which we know through years of teaching experience pose problems for English-speaking learners, and we hope that, as such, it will be clear, easy to use and not too daunting. We have therefore retained the style and the bulk of the material of the original project whilst taking the opportunity to make some changes, additions and updatings. Some of the chapters on vocabulary have been completely rewritten and extended, and there are new chapters on anglicisms and on semi-technical vocabulary. We have continued to focus on vocabulary and grammar, and there is no systematic treatment of pronunciation or of essentially morphological features such as verb forms.