[4] The 1,250-page first edition contained 7,783 Chinese character head entries, alphabetically collated by romanized syllabic order in modified Wade–Giles system, and includes 104,000 words and phrases taken from the classics, general literature, and news media.

After studying lithography at the Working Men's College of Melbourne, the Australian Robert Henry Mathews started a printing business, but in 1906 he abandoned it to become a Congregationalist missionary and join the China Inland Mission (CIM).

Mathews first sailed to China in 1908, and the CIM assigned him to stations in Henan, Anhui, where he became interested in studying the regional varieties of Chinese, and Sichuan.

In 1928, Mathews was assigned to the China Inland Mission headquarters in Shanghai, where he could fully utilize his printing and Chinese linguistic skills.

They commissioned him to revise two out-of-print China Inland Mission publications by Frederick W. Baller, the Analytical Chinese–English Dictionary[3] and Mandarin Primer, both printed in 1900.

[8] Robert Mathew's preface says that in the 30 years since Baller's outdated dictionary, the "influx of modern inventions and the advance of scientific knowledge" in China have introduced many neologisms.

Another shortcoming of Baller's dictionary was inconsistent treatment of Chinese varietal pronunciations, furnishing "the sounds of characters as given in West China" (Southwestern Mandarin and Chang-Du dialect) and ignoring the variety "spoken in the south-eastern.

[11] After Japanese troops in Shanghai destroyed the Mathews' dictionary original printing plates, the lack of copies became an urgent matter for English-speaking Allies of World War II.

[20] Raymond Huang wrote in 1981 a descriptive Mandarin Pronunciation Explained with Diagrams: A Companion to R. H. Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary.

and gave over 104,000 usage examples drawn from "the classics, general literature, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, legal documents, and many other sources", including technical terms "relating to motors, electricity, aviation, [and] wireless".

[31] Mathews occasionally cites Giles's dictionary, such as for the Chinese exonym Xiáyōusī 黠憂斯 "Kyrgyz people".

[38] The Australian National University historian of China C. P. Fitzgerald says a user of Mathews's dictionary will be struck by "the deep scholarship, the care and the accuracy of the man who produced this monument of learning".

rhodonite; rose quartz); carbuncle (possibly an archaic word for "garnet" or "spinel"; overtones of classic, divine and fairy beauty.

"[40] Second, Schafer wrote two supplements noting mistranslations and omissions in Mathews, for example,[41] fang 舫 "A large boat.

The American sinologist Jerry Norman says that from a lexicographic point of view, "Mathews' dictionary was no advance over Giles'" and its only real advantage was that it was more compact and up-to-date with modern terminology.

The lexicographer Robert Dunn says that despite the fact that many of Mathews's dictionary entries are outdated or obsolete, some have changed meanings today, and numerous new and current Chinese terms are omitted, the reference work "will doubtless continue to be one of the most widely used by students of Chinese history, literature, thought, and civilization"..[28] Paul W. Kroll, Professor of Chinese at the University of Colorado, says[31] the most troubling inadequacy of Mathews's dictionary is that "it indiscriminately mixes together vocabulary of all periods", from the ancient Book of Documents to early 20th-century merchant and missionary vocabulary, with the "unhappy result that students infer all terms and meanings to be equally applicable throughout three thousand years of Chinese history".