Qieyun

The Qieyun is a rime dictionary, published in 601 CE during the Sui Dynasty. The title ''Qieyun'' literally means "cutting rimes" referring to the traditional Chinese ''fanqie'' system of spelling, and is thus translatable as "Spelling Rimes."

Lu Fayan was the chief editor. The ''Qieyun'' preface describes how the book originated from discussions with eight of his friends at his home in Chang'an, which was the capital.
In the evening, after they had enjoyed their wine, their discussions always turned to phonology. Differences obtained between the pronunciations of the past and the present and different principles of selection were followed by the various authors. … And so we discussed the right and wrong of South and North, and the prevailing and the obsolete of past and present; wishing to present a more refined and precise standard, we discarded all that was ill-defined and lacked preciseness. … And so I grasped my brush, and aided by the light of a candle, I wrote down a draft summary, which eventually was perfected through wide consultation and penetrating research. None of the editors was originally from Chang'an and they were native speakers of differing dialects; five northern and three southern .

The ''Qieyun'' did not directly record Middle Chinese as a spoken language, but rather how Chinese characters should be pronounced. Since this rime dictionary's spellings are the primary source for reconstructing Middle Chinese, linguists have disagreed over what variety of Chinese it recorded. "Much ink has been spilled concerning the nature of the language underlying the ''Qieyun''," says Norman , who lists three points of view. Some scholars, like Bernhard Karlgren, "held to the view that the ''Qieyun'' represented the language of Chang'an"; some "others have supposed that it represented an amalgam of regional pronunciations," technically known as a koine. "At the present time most people in the field accept the views of the Chinese scholar Zhou Zumo" that ''Qieyun'' spellings were a north-south regional compromise between literary pronunciations from the Southern and Northern Dynasties.

When classical Chinese poetry flowered during the Tang Dynasty, the ''Qieyun'' became the authoritative source for literary pronunciations and it repeatedly underwent revisions and enlargements . It was annotated in 677 by Zhangsun Neyan , revised and published in 706 by Wang Renxu as the ''Kanmiu Buque Qieyun'' , collated and republished in 751 by Sun Mian as the ''Tangyun'' , and eventually incorporated into the still-extant ''Guangyun'' and ''Jiyun'' rime dictionaries from the Song Dynasty. Although most of these Tang dictionary redactions were believed lost, some fragments were discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts and manuscripts discovered at Turfan; and in 1947 a nearly complete manuscript of the 706 edition was found in the Palace Museum.

Like subsequent rime dictionaries, the ''Qieyun'' was organized into the four tone name groups, divided into 193 final rimes , and subdivided into homophone groups . It contains 16,917 character entries.