Walter Henry Medhurst
Two Bible translators edited early Chinese dictionaries. The Scottish missionary Robert Morrison wrote A Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815–1823). The British missionary Walter Henry Medhurst wrote a Hokkien (Min Nan) dialect dictionary in 1832 and the "Chinese and English Dictionary" in 1842. Both were flawed in their representation of pronunciations, such as aspirated stops. In 1874 the American philologist and diplomat Samuel Wells Williams applied the method of dialect comparison in his dictionary, "A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language", which refined distinctions in articulation and gave variant regional pronunciations in addition to standard Peking pronunciation.