Wade-Giles

Wade-Giles is a method used to transcribe Chinese words into the Latin alphabet, developed in the 19th century by British sinologists Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles. It was widely used before the adoption of Pinyin and aimed to represent Chinese sounds accurately using English letters and marks. For example, Beijing was written as Peking. Although it helped introduce Chinese to the West, Wade-Giles can be confusing because of its complex spelling and inconsistent pronunciation rules. Today, Pinyin has mostly replaced Wade-Giles as the standard system for romanizing Chinese.