Romanization of Chinese Words

For the sake of consistency, Chinese words are spelled out using the Hanyu Pinyin system of Romanization throughout this site. Hanyu Pinyin is the current official system used to transcribe Chinese characters into Latin script for the majority of the Chinese speaking world, including China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United Nations. Hanyu Pinyin takes the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of words and converts them into sounds in the English alphabet. Unfortunately, some confusion may arise since many Chinese terms were popularized under previous Romanization systems or other dialects of Chinese, such as Cantonese. Whenever this occurs, the Hanyu Pinyin spelling will be used followed by the more popular spelling in parenthesis. A list of potentially confusing terms is below: