Wade-Giles

Wade-Giles, sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a Romanization (phonetic notation and transliteration) system for the Chinese language based on the form of Mandarin used in Beijing. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade in the mid-19th century, and reached settled form with Herbert Giles's Chinese-English dictionary of 1912. It was the main system of transliteration in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century, replacing the Nanjing-based romanization systems that had been common until late in the 19th century.

One sound-multiple symbols

In addition to several sounds presented using the same letter(s), sometimes, one single sound is represented using several different sets of letters. There exists two versions of Wade-Giles Romanizations for each of the Pinyin syllables zi, ci, and si.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• The older version writes tsû, ts'û, and ssû
• The newer version writes:
• tzu for tsû, but it still remains ts- before other vowels, as in tsung for the Pinyin zong.
• tz'u for ts'û, but remains ts'- before other vowels.
• szu or ssu for ssû, but is s- before other vowels. Note, not ss-.