Qasha Shmuel Dawid was born in Gavilan, Iran in 1872. In 1913 he became priest of St. Ephrem parish in Chicago. This was the first Chaldean Catholic parish to be formed in the United States. Qasha Shmuel developed his own printing type and published several books in the modern Assyrian language in Chicago before his death in 1930. This volume contains two books: ÒThe First English-Chaldean DictionaryÓ and ÒThe Chaldean-English Dictionary, Improved and EnlargedÓ. Despite the use of the word ÒChaldeanÓ in the titles, these dictionaries do not represent the modern Aramiac dialects of Mosul and the Nineveh plains, but rather the standard literary Assyrian dialect that was developed in Urmia, the home of the author. The ÒThe First English-Chaldean DictionaryÓ is a direct translation of an English dictionary and remains the only English-Assyrian dictionary in print to this day.