Unlike the Jusuits missionaries who succeeded in gaining several converts in the Chinese ruling class, the Protestant missionaries had to compile their own dictionaries right at the start of evangelization, in order to keep them in contact with the lower classes.
This paper is an attempt to search for the origin of the Chinese words contained in the following dictionaries :
An English and Chinese Vocabulary in the Court Dialect (1844)
A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1874)