Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hanyu means the Chinese language, and pinyin means "spell sound", or the spelling of the sound. Developed by a government committee in the People's Republic of China, the system was initially approved by the Chinese government on February 11, 1958. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as the international standard in 1979, and since then it has been adopted by many organizations worldwide.

The pinyin system also uses diacritics for the four tones of Mandarin, usually above a non-medial vowel. The tone chart below displays the relative pitch changes of the four tones.

• New Edition Hanyu Pinyin Syllable Table
• Online Chinese typing with tones
• Comprehensive explanation of pinyin
• English Wiktionary - Useful resource for identifying Chinese characters (copy and paste individual characters into "search" box)
• Hanyu Pinyin Information
• Read/Write using Unicode
• Tongyong and Hanyu Pinyin
• U.S. Library of Congress conversion page
• Wiktionary:Pinyin index
• Zhuyin?Wade-Giles?Pinyin word list