This book has a triple origin.

First, it is the book-length version of an article which I published in 1998, ‘The etymologies in Plato's Cratylus’ (Journal of Hellenic Studies 118). That article itself had grown out of a long-held conviction that the main obstacle to an adequate understanding of this under-appreciated dialogue was – and had been for a century and a quarter – the refusal to accept as seriously meant the long series of etymologies which occupies nearly two thirds of the dialogue. The conviction had been strengthened by a seminar on the dialogue at Cambridge over a six-month period in 1994–5, at which a division on this issue dominated much of our discussion. Consequently the book's genesis owes a good deal of its impetus to my Cambridge colleagues of the time, on whichever side of the divide they may happen to have taken up arms: especially Malcolm Schofield, Geoffrey Lloyd, Robert Wardy and Myles Burnyeat, the last of whom helped develop a number of the core ideas that have gone into my argument.

Second, the book is a monograph planned and designed for the new Cambridge University Press series which it is helping to inaugurate, ‘Cambridge Studies in the Dialogues of Plato’. Its conception and execution owe a great deal to the advice and encouragement of the series editor, Mary Margaret McCabe, as also to Pauline Hire and Michael Sharp as successive Classics editors for CUP.