Even a cursory examination of English phraseology reveals the existence of numerous idiomatic expressions and recurrent word com- binations characterized by similarity of wording or imagery without corresponding similarity in their meaning or usage. Phraseological units of this kind usually form pairs and sometimes larger groups of expressions not normally inter- changeable in their respective contexts or only interchangeable in some of their meanings so er- rors can arise whenever one expression is suffi- ciently close to another to be semantically iden- tified with it, cf.: bring one’s mind to something / bring something to mind or at the top of the tree / up a tree. While positive intralingual transfer may help in the case of perceived linguistic sim- ilarities, cf.: make hay while the sun shines / strike while the iron is hot, negative intralingual transfer will lead to problems owing to semantic or grammatical differences between units. The probability of their confusion is conditioned by the extent of similarity while their respective lin- guistic currency determines which unit in the group is likely to be mistaken for another more familiar and seemingly identical expression. Alongside such phraseological “false friends” there exist less numerous cases of “false enemies” or pseudo-antonyms whose form may induce the learner to believe that they are opposite in meaning which in reality they are not,* cf.: ab- sence of mind / presence of mind and come on the carpet / step off the carpet. Whereas errors caused by interlingual phraseological interference are predetermined by the student’s first language and mostly occur when learners pattern phrases in the target lan- guage after the models of their own language, errors caused by intralingual phraseological in- terference are generally due to erroneous iden- tification within the framework of the target lan- guage of semantically unrelated phraseological units with conceptually related components. Er- rors of this kind do not depend on the learners’ first language and are common to all EFL/ESL students. They may adversely affect comprehen- sion and usage, so learners are in urgent need for practical resource that will systematically ad- dress this problem and “defuse” potentially con- fusable multi-word units. Nonetheless, prior to the present publication there was no dictionary Introduction FALSE “FRIENDSAND “ENEMIES IN ENGLISH PHRASEOLOGY –3– *The phenomenon of “false friends” is commonly associated with words of different languages relating as formal equivalents for the reason of their material similarity while their meanings are quite different. A similar phenomenon can be observed at the phraseological level when set expressions of one language have formal, semantically dissimilar equivalents in another language (for instance, the following English expressions have their exact formal counterparts in Russian with altogether different meanings: dirty money, high words, service flat, special school, art film, wind in the head, etc.).