Bopomofo was first introduced in China during the 1910s by the Beiyang government, where it was used alongside Wade–Giles, a romanization system which used a modified Latin alphabet.

Today, Bopomofo is more common in Taiwan than on the mainland, and is used as the primary electronic input method for Taiwanese Mandarin, as well as in dictionaries and other non-official documents.

[4] The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, led by Wu Zhihui from 1912 to 1913, created a system called Zhuyin Zimu,[4] which was based on Zhang Binglin's shorthand.

It was used as the official phonetic script to annotate the sounds of the characters in accordance with the Old National Pronunciation.

[6] A draft was released on 11 July 1913, by the Republic of China National Ministry of Education, but it was not officially proclaimed until 23 November 1928.

[7] Bopomofo is the predominant phonetic system in teaching reading and writing in elementary school in Taiwan.

Additionally, one children's newspaper in Taiwan, the Mandarin Daily News, annotates all articles with Bopomofo ruby characters.

In teaching Mandarin, Taiwan institutions and some overseas communities such as Filipino Chinese use Bopomofo.

[26] Bopomofo and pinyin are based on the same Mandarin pronunciations; hence there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two systems: 1 Not written.

In Taiwan, Bopomofo is used to teach Taiwanese Hokkien, and is also used to transcribe it phonetically in contexts such as on storefront signs, karaoke lyrics, and film subtitles.

It is one of the few input methods that can be found on most modern personal computers without having to download or install any additional software.

On the QWERTY keyboard, the symbols are ordered column-wise top-down (e.g. 1+Q+A+Z) Bopomofo was added to the Unicode Standard in October 1991 with the release of version 1.0.

The Unicode block for Bopomofo is U+3100–U+312F: Additional characters were added in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0.