Lin's bilingual dictionary continues to be used in the present day, particularly the free online version that the Chinese University of Hong Kong established in 1999.

Users would input a character by pressing two keys based upon the 33 basic stroke formations, which Lin called "letters of the Chinese Alphabet".

[3] In the period between Mathews' and Lin's dictionaries, both the Chinese and English vocabularies underwent radical changes in terminology for fields such as popular culture, economics, politics, science, and technology.

Lin's dictionary included many neologisms and loanwords not found in Mathews', for example (in pinyin), yuánzǐdàn 原子彈 " atomic bomb", hépíng gòngchǔ 和平共處 "peaceful coexistence", xị̌nǎo 洗腦 "brainwash", tàikōngrén 太空人 "astronaut", yáogǔn 搖滾 "rock 'n' roll", and xīpí 嬉皮 "hippie".

Lin started working on the dictionary in Taipei, and in the spring of 1967, he accepted the position of Research Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

[6] After completing the manuscript in the spring of 1971, Lin moved to Hong Kong, where his former student Francis Pan and a team of young Chinese University graduates assisted him with copyediting, research, and final preparations.

Sponsored by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, this book was printed in Japan by Kenkyūsha, which is known for publishing high-quality dictionaries, and was distributed by McGraw-Hill in the United States.

A team of scholars at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Research Centre for Humanities Computing developed a free web edition of Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage and published it online in 1999.

The web edition dictionary replaces Lin Yutang's obsolete Gwoyeu Romatzyh system with modern standard pinyin romanization, which users can hear pronounced through speech synthesis.

Standard GR uses these same four tonal spellings for many syllables (tones 1-4 are a, ar, aa, and ah), but changes them for some others, including guo, gwo (國), guoo, and guoh; and yiu, yu, yeu (語), yuh.

I don't need to emphasize the point that the method of building the tone into the spelling of the word fits the modern world of telegraphy, the typewriter and the computer".

[10] The Chinese character 道 for dào "way; path; say; the Dao" or dǎo "guide; lead; instruct" (or 導) provides a good sample entry for a dictionary because it has two pronunciations and is polysemous.

Reviewers of Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage have praised some aspects like the translation equivalents and censured others like the "instant" character indexing system.

On the one hand, New York Times reporter Peggy Durdin calls the dictionary a "milestone in communication between the world's two largest linguistic groups, the Chinese‐speaking and English‐speaking peoples".

[3] On the other, the American sinologist and historian Nathan Sivin says, "Despite a good deal of meretricious ballyhoo when it was published, Lin's book does not contain significant lexicographic innovations.

[18] What Lin called an "unforgettable instant index system", proved to be "an unnecessary and not easily remembered variation on the traditional four-corner arrangement".

While one reviewer called the romanization system "revolutionary even though it has been in existence for quite some time", and agreed with Lin that "as a learning tool, the "basic" GR is better",[21] others have been less impressed.

[19] Many reviewers have commented on the wide range of entries in Lin's dictionary, which is aimed not at students of a special field, but at "modern, educated man".

However, this process of elimination gave rise to mistakes, such as omitting some common literary clichés (chu-erl-faan-er 出爾反爾 "outstanding") and overlooking frequently used meanings ("to complete the apprenticeship" for chu-shyw 出師 "to march army for battle").

Lin's dictionary "covers essential Chinese as spoken and written today outside the People's Republic and ignores terminology peculiar to mainland China".

[18] Dunn estimates that only about 1% of the total number of entries are "Chinese Communist words and phrases", such as xiàfàng 下放 "send down urban cadres to work at a lower level or do manual labor in the countryside" and Dà yuè jìn 大跃进 "Great Leap Forward".

[24] Reviewers have frequently commended Lin's dictionary for its accurate English translation equivalents of each head character and its multiple usage examples.

Sivin says that "in accuracy of translation, clarity of explanation, and colloquialism of English equivalents this is greatly superior to any other dictionary in a Western European language".

Of course there are instances where better English equivalents could have been found, and his scholarship is not infallible, but it probably is true, as Professor Li claims, that he is uniquely qualified, among individuals, to bridge the gap between the two languages".

[14] Sivin describes Lin's grouping of words by English parts of speech as "linguistically retrograde and confusing, since the structure of Chinese is quite different".

Yet, the chiaan 遣 entry writes the example word chiaanshuh 遣戌 "send to exile" twice as "遣戍"; an error that the revised 1987 edition corrected.