Shaanxi
name ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A province of China, including the Wei River valley and the fertile southern half of the Ordos Loop, comprising much of the Loess Plateau. Capital: Xi'an.
"The fact, therefore, that the Tae pings, when they raised the siege of Hwae king on the 1st September marched westwards by it into Shan se, shows that the Imperial forces were strong enough to prevent their descent by the Wei river."
Example
More examples"Heavy rain has also caused the Yellow River, which runs through northern China, to burst its banks, blocking a section of a railway line in the northwest province of Shaanxi."
Etymology
From a modified form of the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of Chinese 陝西 /陕西 (Shǎnxī, “West of the Shan [Pass]”). The double-a spelling, used certainly to avoid homography with Shanxi (山西, of shān rather than shǎn), is not a feature of Hanyu Pinyin and cannot be observed outside reference to Shaanxi (see also: Ningshaan, Shaanbei, Shaan-Gan-Ning, Shaanzhong). It is likely inherited from the pre-Pinyin Latinxua Sin Wenz system devised and employed by Communist linguists, which was toneless and employed "irregular spellings" for undesirable homographs. The pairs Shaansi (陝西 /陕西) and Shansi (山西) appear (for the first time?) in the influential Sin Wenz primer 《中國話寫法拉丁化——理論·原則·方案》 (1935). An alternative theory is that the double-a spelling is from the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization system, where the third tone is spelled by doubling a vowel (Shaanshi 陝西 /陕西 vs. Shanshi 山西), but this is less likely considering the history of Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Sin Wenz, including the political and ideological rivalry between the two systems.
Related phrases
More for "shaanxi"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.