What does "wade-giles" mean?

A system for transcribing the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese into the Latin alphabet; formally uses hyphens and the spiritus asper apostrophe.

Wade-giles

name

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Definitions

Proper Noun

1
A system for transcribing the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese into the Latin alphabet; formally uses hyphens and the spiritus asper apostrophe.
"The pronunciation aids to Chinese names are of doubtful value. They are not phonetic, being only a slight modification of the Wade-Giles system, and become really confusing when Mandarin pronunciations are given for Cantonese or historical spellings."

Synonyms

All synonyms

wade

Example

More examples

"The pronunciation aids to Chinese names are of doubtful value. They are not phonetic, being only a slight modification of the Wade-Giles system, and become really confusing when Mandarin pronunciations are given for Cantonese or historical spellings."

Etymology

1943. Named after British diplomats Thomas Francis Wade and Herbert Giles, who developed the system in the 19th century.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.