Wang did not adopt the general teaching style employed by other private schools at the time, which emphasized memorization of text over comprehension.

He accidentally found fourteen boxes of books, ranging from history to astronomy to medicine, accompanied by the authors' footnotes and literature reviews of various works.

Among the thirty-two students that entered Tsinghua University in the same year as Wang, he was the only one that chose to study linguistics with Chao.

[8] Wang said that "While Liang encourages innovation, Chao emphasizes practicality, both of which are indispensable to the study of linguistics".

[1] After reading the paper, Chao suggested that Wang delete the postscript, claiming that he could not assert the grammatical rules of a language before fully acquiring it.

Wang supplemented his education by translating French literature into Chinese, and his works were greatly recognized and praised by the editor of the Commercial Press, Ye Shengtao.

[7] During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Wang supported himself through a great number of publications, including newspaper columns and essays on a variety of subjects and genres.

By the end of the war, Wang's research had expanded to phonology, morphology, syntax, poetry and dialectal studies, and he began to plan for the future of Chinese linguistics.

This collection of essays is less academically rigid but profound and reflective, which deeply influenced the people during the hardship of wartime.

However, Wang derided the miserly pay for labor from the Chinese government by saying that with salaries being so low, 薪水 should be renamed 茶(tea)水(water) or 风(wind)水(water), as the only thing people could buy with the scarce amount of money was tea or wind.

He included selections of classical Chinese literature with detailed annotation, lessons on background knowledge, and a glossary of commonly used words, combining theory and practical usage as the method of instruction.

With Wang as the original editor-in-chief, this dictionary has proven to be extremely popular, having undergone over 100 printings since its initial publication in 1980 (most recent revision, 5th ed.

In 1957, Wang finished writing the book Hanyu Shigao 漢語史稿 A Draft History of the Chinese Language.

He began to work on it, but after completing fifty-odd pages, the manuscript was confiscated and destroyed when Red Guards raided his home.

[18] After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Wang was determined to work harder to compensate for the six years he had lost due to the political upheaval.

[6][7] In 1984, at the age of 84, he started to compile a dictionary for ancient Chinese, writing thousands of characters everyday, regardless of his deteriorated vision and other health conditions.

In order to minimize the cataract's hindrance, he bought many magnifiers, switching from one to the other so that he could continue reading and writing, until he was no longer able to work.

In general, the work is informed by and incorporates the principles of Western historical linguistics, something that Wang felt was missing in previous dictionaries that descended more-or-less directly from China's native philological traditions.

In the preface, Wang criticized some incorrect interpretations of citations in previously published dictionaries like the Cihai or Ciyuan for definitions incompatible with the historical evolution of a character's meaning.

In addition to giving the original Classical and pre-Classical definitions of a character, it also provides Old Chinese rime group and Middle Chinese fanqie, and gives collections of characters of common etymological origin, often, but not necessarily, derived from the same graphic element (e.g., 才，財，材 and 家，嫁，居).

[7] Wang pointed out in his book Zhong Guo Yu Yan Xue Shi 中国语言学史 (History of Chinese Linguistics) that in the past, Chinese scholars mistakenly regarded philology as linguistics and overly emphasized exploring the literature instead of the language itself.