A simple single drop liquid-phase microextraction (SDME) technique, combined with electrothermal atomic absorption spectroscopy (ETAAS) is developed both to preconcentrate and determine thallium (I) ions in aqueous solutions. The ions were transferred from 10.0 ml of aqueous sample (donor phase) containing 0.5 ml of 1% picric acid as the ion-pair agent into a 3 mu l microdrop of nitrobenzene (acceptor phase) containing dicyclohexano-18-crown-6 as the complexing agent. The latter will help to improve the extraction efficiency of the analyte. After the ions have been extracted, the acceptor drop was directly injected into a graphite furnace for thallium (I) determination. Several parameters such as the extracting solvent, extraction time, temperature, concentration of picric acid and crown ether, drop volume and stirring rate were examined. Under the optimized experimental conditions, the detection limit (L.O.D.) was 0.7 ng ml(-1). The relative standard deviation for five replicate analysis of 10 ng ml(-1) of thallium (I) was 5.1%. The calibration curve was linear in the range of 3-22 ng ml(-1). The results for determination of thallium in reference material, spiked tap water and seawater demonstrated the accuracy, recovery and applicability of the presented method. The enrichment factor was 50. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V.