The Study of Chinese Sound and Meaning is an emergent discipline formed by the convergence of various academic fields such as philology, phonology, exegesis, grammar, and bibliography. This subject is dedicated to exploring the correspondence of sound and meaning of Chinese language throughout history, especially ancient Chinese. Its research encompasses, but is not limited to, the following areas: (1) Theoretical, material, and methodological issues in the Study of Chinese Sound and Meaning; (2) The essential differences and connections between phonetic annotations in Chinese phonosemantic books, rhyme dictionaries, and dictionaries of Chinese characters; (3) The relationships between phonetic annotations and the Chinese character glyphs; (4) Integrated research on phonetics, semantics, and grammar; (5) The systematic evolution and development of the correspondence of Chinese sound and meaning; (6) The compilation and study of Chinese phonosemantic literature, and more. The Study of Chinese Sound and Meaning requires the integrated use of multidisciplinary research tools such as philology, phonology, exegesis, grammar, textual research, digital humanities, etc., and thus has strong interdisciplinary attributes. As a typical interdisciplinary subject, the establishment of the Study of Chinese Sound and Meaning responds to the objective needs of academic development in the new era.

To transform old words into new words is a very efficient mode of word derivation in contemporary Chinese, which mainly involves the transformation of word form and the transformation of meaning. In the process of transforming the old words language users have created a lot of new words that are very novel in form or meaning based on the relationship between Chinese characters in terms of sound, shape and meaning or the structural features of Chinese characters. This paper lists more than 130 new appellations including sound-based words, form-based words, meaning-based words and words produced by changing the structure of Chinese characters, names the ways how old words transform into new words as JieYinFuXing, XieYinFuYi, BieJieFuYi, FanBeiFuYi, GaiZiBianXing and describes the transformation process of these words. These lexical phenomenons reflect some language psychology such as pursuing new differences, playing jokes and mental association. They have some impacts on the lexical system of contemporary Chinese as they open up new ways for the generation and change of contemporary Chinese words, they supplement the word-making methods and lead to some unconventional combinations in contemporary Chinese lexis. This paper intends to further clarify the important role of Chinese characters in word creation and word development, and deepen the understanding of Chinese Character study and contemporary Chinese lexicology.