The new printing of Combinatorics on words does not bring many changes. Except for the correction of some misprints and errors, the text has not been modified. I would like to thank those readers who have sent corrections and, in particular, Aldo De Luca, Pavel Goralcik and Bruno Petazzoni.

More than ten years have passed since the first publication of this book. A lot of water has flowed under the bridges of Lotharingia since then.

There is bad news, first. Roger Lyndon, the author of the Foreword of the first edition passed away a few years ago, leaving the memory of a great mathematician and a marvellous man, as did Marcel-Paul Schützenberger this year. He was the spirit behind the scene, and most of the ideas contained in the book were inspired by him. Also, the collective group of authors almost entirely consists of his former students. It is a small tribute to dedicate this book to him.

There is also good news. A new volume on the subject of combinatorics on words is in preparation. It will contain chapters, written by new authors, on topics that had not been included in this volume, making a complementary work, but one which can be read independently. It will cover in particular some aspects of symbolic dynamics, the theory of Young tableaux through the approach of the plactic monoid, combinatorial aspects of free algebras, number systems, and word functions.