This is the first English-Khmer (Cambodian) dictionary to be published in the Western world. It contains some 40,000 English entries and subentries and their translations. The primary objective of the dictionary is to provide a corpus of basic words and phrases which it would be useful for Western students of Khmer to know how to say or write in standard Khmer. The second objective is to provide the first comprehensive English-Khmer dictionary for Khmer students learning English, particularly important now because of the recent arrival in the United States of more than 15,000 Khmer refugees. The third objective is to provide a research tool for those linguists, philologists, and other scholars interested in the study of the Khmer language, notable both for its rich literary traditions and for its place in the linguistic history of Southeast Asia. To meet the needs of both English-and-Khmer-speaking users, Huffman and Proum have tried to reflect not only the semantic structure of English but also the semantic structure of and content of Khmer, which has a complicated system of context-oriented vocabulary in which the word chosen depends on the status of the person addressed.
To do this, they have devised an original format that permits them, in a minimum of space, to provide a clarifying context for every different meaning of the English entry being translated.
