Wade-Giles

Etymology

1912: From Thomas Wade (1818-1895), and Herbert Giles (1845-1935), developers of the Wade-Giles system.

Noun

Wade-Giles or Wade-Giles system

1. A system to phonetically spell the Mandarin dialect of the Chinese language using the Roman alphabet. It was the mostly widely used of such systems throughout most of the 20th century, but is being gradually replaced by the more accessible Pinyin sytem.

Examples

The following are some examples of Chinese words and names spelled in Wade-Giles and in Pinyin.

Wade-Giles	Pinyin
Tao	Dao
Tao Te Ching	Daodejing
Pei-ching	Beijing
Chuang-tzu	Zhuangzi
K'ung-fu-tzu	Kongfuzi
I Ching	Yi Jing
Ch'i	Qi