pinyin: [20] Pinyin is a system of writing Chinese in Roman characters which began to be introduced in China in the late 1950s. The term in Chinese means literally ‘spell-sound’.
system of Romanized spelling for Chinese, 1963, from Chinese pinyin "to spell, to combine sounds into syllables," from pin "put together" + yin "sound, tone." Adopted officially by the People's Republic of China in 1958. Outside China gradually superseding the 19c. Wade-Giles system (Mao Tse-tung is Wade-Giles, Mao Zedong is pinyin).
