: a system for romanizing Chinese ideograms in which tones are indicated by diacritics and unaspirated consonants are transcribed as voiced compare wade-giles
Example Sentences
Recent Examples on the WebThe committee then turned to a new system of romanization, known today as pinyin. Hugo Restall, WSJ, 1 Mar. 2022 To integrate that useful principle into his encoding scheme, Zhi decided to index characters by their components—the simpler characters within each ideograph—using the first letter of each component’s pinyin spelling. Jing Tsu, Wired, 23 Jan. 2022 And the campaign has already caused a stir online, with many questioning the rationale behind such replacements, since foreign visitors who don't speak any Chinese are unlikely to understand pinyin. Nectar Gan And Steve George, CNN, 5 Jan. 2022 The most common method used pinyin, the system of romanized spelling for Mandarin that Chinese students learn in school. Mara Hvistendahl, Wired, 18 May 2020
Word History
Etymology
Chinese (Beijing) pīnyīn to spell phonetically, from pīn to arrange + yīn sound, pronunciation