A Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary is the magnum opus of Professor Harry L. Shorto (1919-1995), formerly Professor of Mon-Khmer Studies in the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, until his retirement in 1984. He is the author of two standard reference works, A Dictionary of Modern Spoken Mon (1962) and the highly respected author of the standard reference to epigraphic Mon – A Dictionary of the Mon Inscriptions (1971) – as well as the classic dictionary. Shorto held the Chair in Mon-Khmer Studies. The MKCD is Shorto's grand synthesis of seventy years of historical and comparative research on the Mon-Khmer languages.

Meant to be published in the early 1980s, Shorto's manuscript was rediscovered by his daughter Anna, and has been carefully edited in line with the author's intentions. The MKCD presents 2,246 etymologies with almost 30,000 lexical citations; even today, it is the most extensive analysis of Mon-Khmer to appear since Wilhelm Schmidt laid the foundations of comparative Mon-Khmer exactly 100 years ago with the Grundzüge einer Lautlehre der Mon-Khmer-Sprachen (1905) and Die Mon-Khmer-Völker (1906).

A Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary includes numerous Munda, Austronesian, Thai, Burmese and Chinese lexical comparisons. It is an incomparable resource for studying Southeast Asia's rich legacy of language contact, and for investigating distant genetic relations with its largest, oldest language family. Clearly establishing the terms of reference for future discussion of Mon-Khmer etymology, Shorto's MKCD joins such defining works as Emeneau and Burrow's A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (1961) and Turner's A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages (1966-85) in the canon of 20th century comparative linguistics.