Abstract：Studies show that there are a great number of phonemic loans ( words with the same or similar pronunciation but different character patterns) in ancient Chinese classical literary works and other ancient documents, which were taken as wrongly written characters in former studies that further misled interpretations of those documents. Based on more than 20 years research of ancient documents and classical literary works, the author proposes the theory of phonemic loans, and further analyzes their general situation, formation, classification, scope of application, values and research achievements, which shows the theory of phonemic loans is of significant academic and practical value.

Keyword：ancient documents;ancient Chinese characters;theory of phonemic loans;