This review covers developments in Water Analysis over the period of 1999-2000. A few significant references that appeared between January and February 2001 are also included. Previous Water Analysis reviews have been very comprehensive, often including more than 500 references. This year, however, Analytical Chemistry is changing its approach to these reviews to only include 100-200 significant references and to mainly focus on trends in analytical methods. This was a difficult task, as the scope of Water Analysis is inherently broad, encompassing analytical studies involving all types of contaminantssorganic and inorganic, as well as microorganisms. Rather than choosing a subarea to focus on, this review will still attempt to cover most areas, except with fewer references. As a result, this review was by necessity very selective, and not all good references could be discussed. Typically, when there were two or more of the same type of analytical method developed for a particular set of analytes, only one was chosen as representative of the method. Also, in this review, there is more of a focus on the analytical methods themselves and less on results from significant studies. Papers focusing on the treatment of pollutants are generally omitted, as are most health effects papers. The upside to including fewer references is that those included can be discussed in greater detail, and more attention can be given to trends and comparisons of new methods to former ones.Numerous abstracts were consulted before choosing the best ones to present here. If an abstract was generally unclear or ambiguous, it was generally excluded. If the subject matter of the abstract appeared to be of routine nature, with no new, significant findings, it was also generally excluded. A table of acronyms is included (Table 1) as a quick reference to the acronyms of analytical techniques and other terms discussed in this review.The overall trends in analytical methods for water analysis include a greater use of solid-phase microextraction (SPME); fast gas chromatography (GC), and liquid chromatography (LC) methods; more on-line coupling of separation and extraction with detection (such as ion chromatography (IC) coupled to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS), IC coupled to atmospheric pressure chemical ionization mass spectrometry (APCI-MS), solid-phase extraction (SPE) coupled to LC/MS or GC/MS, and membrane introduction mass spectrometry (MIMS) coupled to fast-GC/MS; and increased use of capillary electrophoresis (CE), large-volume GC injection, and enzyme-linked