THE six self-made young millionaires on the cover this week are limned against a golden carpet of rare coins from the collection of the Chase Manhattan Bank Money Museum. Reaching back to 1795, the six featured coins had original values ranging from $10 to $50, and today are worth from $500 to $6,000. Photographs of the vintage coins by Frank Lerner and pictures of the highly valued young men by Phil Bath, Ormond Gigli, J. Alex Langley and Ben Martin were melded into the cover design by Charles P. Jackson.

Selecting the six gilt-edged men for the cover was considerably more complicated than choosing the background. More than 120 candidates were considered and some 60 inter viewed in 30 states. To qualify for the cover, the millionaire had to be American, under 40, self-made and interesting. In an assignment that might be the envy of many a girl, Researcher Mary Cronin not only interviewed 15 young millionaires but also talked to physicians, psychiatrists and clergymen on what makes a man want to make a mil lion. As he handed in his story for editing by Edward Jamieson, Marshall Loeb couldn't resist the observation that writing a TIME cover calls for about the same ingredients as becoming a millionaire: careful research, singleness of purpose and a lot of effort.

BRITAIN and America, as Oscar Wilde saw it, are two countries divided by the same language. No one would agree with Wilde more than a Swedish lexicographer immersed in a mighty labor of scholarship that has occupied his last 26 years and will not be completed for at least another two. He is Ingvar Gullberg, and his two-part work is a Swedish-English and English-Swedish dictionary of technical words and terms used in business, industry, administration, education and research. We were pleased to hear last week that one of his most important sources is TIME.

Gullberg, official English translator in the Swedish Foreign Office, has published the first volume, a 1,246-page book containing 130,000 extensive entries, which is unique in that, where necessary, he renders the Swedish in both the Queen's English and the American variety. It has been hailed by scholars, businessmen, diplomats, technicians and others who work in the two languages. Lexicographer Gullberg subscribes to and carefully reads 40 English-language publications, including the London and New York Times, the Financial Times, the Economist, the Guardian, TIME and LIFE. His first and main source of new English words and terms is TIME. When our Stockholm correspondent asked him why, he in turn asked: "Where else can I get a publication that gives such coverage to every branch of human activity?"

Only TIME gets what he calls the filter treatment. He goes through the magazine line by line, cover to cover every week, noting every new word and term and the context in which it is used. New words, he says, are coming into usage at an unprecedented rate, particularly in English, the prevalent language of commerce and technology. Virtually all the space-age terms he defines in the Swedish-English volume he filtered out of TIME'S columns. Gullberg says: "Many of TIME'S own neologisms have come to stay in the language." We can't wait to see how a few of our recent coinages--non-book, Vietnik, op art--are minted into Swedish.

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