Shiming

The Shiming (simplified Chinese: 释名; traditional Chinese: 釋名; pinyin: Shìmíng; Wade–Giles: Shih Ming; literally "Explaining Names / Explanation of Names"), also known as the Yìyǎ (逸雅; I-ya; "Lost Erya"), is a Chinese dictionary that employed phonological glosses, and "is believed to date from c. 200 " (Miller 1980: 424).

This dictionary is linguistically invaluable, because it records the pronunciation of Han-era spoken Chinese. Sinologists have used its data to approximate the dates when phonological changes, such as the loss of consonant clusters which took place between Old Chinese and Middle Chinese.