In the first place, the Chinese language has only about 400 distinct sounds (virtually all characters are single syllable). Because it employs tones—from four to eight depending on the “dialect”—the sounds may be multiplied to 1600, but this is still a very small number for developing a vocabulary, and of course the sounds are not distributed evenly across the characters. Consequently there are a very large number of homonyms in Chinese. In a modern 5000+ dictionary, for example, there are 81 graphs pronounced yi, 46 of them in the falling tone; 80 graphs are pronounced shi, 15 in the even tone. Anciently there were a number of consonantal endings to the sounds that have since disappeared in most dialects, but even then there would be anywhere from 3 to 10 or more different graphs—hence with different meanings—pronounced in exactly the same way (Karlgren 1966).