This paper presents an adaptive tracking control method for a class of nonlinearly parameterized MIMO dynamic systems with time-varying delay and unknown nonlinear dead-zone inputs. A new high dimensional integral Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional is introduced for the adaptive controller to guarantee global stability of the considered systems and also ensure convergence of the tracking errors to the origin. The proposed method provides an alternative to existing methods used for MIMO time-delay systems with dead-zone nonlinearities. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.