Wells Williams' Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect (1856) was seen by the author as helping to make 'a tolerably complete apparatus' for learning the Canton dialect. It is arranged alphabetically, using a variant of Sir William Jones' system for representing Oriental languages. To save space, only the syllable heading of each entry is given with a Chinese character; the compounds included under the head syllable are given in romanization only. The 'tonic' of the title refers to the ordering of the entries: 'the characters [...] are arranged under each syllable, according to their tones'. In addition, there is a character index, arranged by radical. Its publication marked a decisive step forward for the study of Cantonese, making available for the first time a reasonably comprehensive guide to the language accessible both through romanization and a character index.
