In the modern period, various forms of Chinese character dictionary were created under the influence of new compilation methods from the West and Japan, while inheriting the tradition of the existing bibliography. These dictionaries use the basic form of notation for Korean Chinese sounds and interpretation of the meaning of each letter, but many of them contain Chinese sounds. Therefore, the modern dictionary also served as a Chinese dictionary, in the absence of a Chinese-Korean dictionary at the time. The 『Hanilseonmanshin Dictionary』(1937) was compiled by Lee Myung-chil, a former teacher at the Government Hanseong Korean Language School, and supervised by Moon Se-young, a Korean and Chinese scholar, and it provides not only detailed examples of Chinese, but also a specific sound study of Chinese is included. In this dictionary, Mandarin pronunciation of initial in ‘容’, ‘榮’ are zero initial, finals of ‘兄’, ‘榮’, and ‘永’ are written as ‘ᅟᆔᆼ’, and finals of ‘波’, ‘破’, and ‘末’ are written as ‘ㅓ’, as well as several multiple tones of some character. In addition, Manjueum, or northeastern dialect,, is also recorded.
The modern dictionary contains information on Sino-Korean sounds of all Chinese characters, Chinese character vocabulary, and Chinese sounds in the early 20th century; thus, it has a very important position as a bridge to reveal Korean and Chinese history. This study is meaningful as it has expanded the scope of modern dictionary research by examining the system and Chinese sound of the 『Hanilseonmanshin Dictionary』, which have not been studied before, revealing its research value and re-examining the role of modern dictionary as a Chinese dictionary.