The Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese (1947), which was compiled by Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang, made numerous important lexicographic innovations.

At the beginning of World War II, the shortage of Chinese and Japanese bilingual dictionaries became an urgent matter for English-speaking Allies.

Yang compiled the preliminary list of entries, partially drafted the definitions, served both as informant and as grammarian on Beijing dialect, and wrote the characters.

Some English–Chinese entries are quite elaborate, providing multiple Chinese translation equivalents and usage examples illustrating various semantic nuances of the English word.

"In both dictionaries we can observe the authors attempting not just to provide their Chinese entries with English equivalents but to demonstrate through grammatical categorization and examples how they are actually used".

The Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese comprises approximately 5,000 single-character head entries, collated by radical-and-stroke and numbered according to the 214 Kangxi radicals.

The Concise Dictionary includes the popular and cursive forms of many characters, as well as the Suzhou numerals (e.g., "〢 ell Soochow numeral for '2', used in trade"), and the Bopomofo symbols ("ㄎ ke National Phonetic letter for the aspirated initial k"), which had never been included in a Chinese dictionary, thus removing "one source of bewilderment for the foreign student of Chinese".

[15] The dictionary lists other specialized grammatical categories,[16] for instance, "auxiliary nouns proper" and "quasi-auxiliary nouns", and introduces for the first time in a Chinese dictionary "many new ideas about the linguistic structure of Chinese, such as the four types of verbal complements": the "pre-transitive," "verb-object construction", "possessive object," and "impersonal verb-object compound"".

or implied in the translation (as 殆 "well-nigh," but 差不多 "almost"), in order to "channel the student's efforts in using the language to more profitable directions".

For examples, a subscribed dot under an initial (恤 ṣhiuh [xù] "to pity, to give relief to") makes it possible for students interested in Peking opera to distinguish 尖 "sharp" dental consonants from 圓 "rounded" palatal consonants, and a superscript p indicates Cantonese has a final -p checked tone and Wu Chinese has a glottal stop.

We can classify their affinities, their electric polarity, indicate whether they can be ionized, and give such information as to enable us to predict more compounds than can be listed.

The Chinese character 道 (composed of radical 162 辶 "walk" and a shǒu 首 "head" phonetic) for dào "way; path; say; the Dao" or dǎo "guide; lead; instruct" makes a good sample entry for illustrating a dictionary because it has two pronunciations and complex semantics.

Second, it gives English translation equivalents for the bound word (B) dàoli 道理, with the dot before 理 denoting neutral tone li, and the subscript 96 meaning radical 96 玉 "jade" where a dictionary user can find the character 理 lii listed under 96.7, with 7 being the number of strokes in the lǐ 里 phonetic.

Fifth, dàor 道兒 or dàozi 道子 (tz denotes the noun suffix 子) can mean "streak", counted with tiáo 條 or ge 個 "general measure word".

Eighth, it also means "to say (polite words)" in bound terms such as dàoxǐ 道喜 (subscript 30 denotes radical 30 口 "mouth"), dàoxiè 道謝, and yǒudào 有道.

The co-author Lien-Sheng Yang responded to DeFrancis' and Simon's reviews in a 1949 article about free and bound morphemes in Chinese.

[24] The Chinese linguist Luo Changpei describes the dictionary as "unprecedented in the history of Chinese-European lexicography since its beginnings" in the early 17th century.

[27] The American linguist and lexicographer John DeFrancis described the Concise Dictionary as "a landmark notable for its presentation of a great deal of extremely valuable information—grammatical, phonetic, dialectical, and otherwise".

Of the entries which really represent spoken forms, no more than 29 per cent have been classified by the authors as Free, the only category which is generally accepted as designating a word in English and other languages.

The remaining 22 per cent, represented by shan and hu in shanhu, "coral," are of a type which have no more meaning or independence than do cor and al in the English equivalent.

[29] In response to DeFrancis' review, Lien-sheng Yang states that comparing the dictionary entries designated as literary to yclept in English is "misleading, because the latter is an archaic word, whereas the former are still used in modern Spoken Chinese".

Taking the example of shan and hu in shanhu "coral", Yang notes both characters are used in other compounds, namely, shanshan 珊珊 "tinkling sound (of ornaments)" and hulian 瑚璉 "two types of ritual vessels".

[19] Simon says [O]ne can readily see that a dictionary which notes the alternatives "free" or "bound" in the case of each single character, is a mine of information which may lend itself to very important subsequent research.