The authors measured the elec. field induced linear dichroism for a wide range of sizes of CdSe nanocrystals. Large ground-state dipole moments were obsd., esp. for the smallest crystals. In these, the authors found a very large anisotropy of the absorption and most of the dipole strength is along the direction of the ground-state dipole moment. For the anisotropy, the authors propose a mechanism for intensity borrowing from intraband transitions, induced by the field of the ground-state dipole moment.