In 1917, Li Jinxi submitted a “Proposal for Conducting National Language Research and Surveys” to the Ministry of Education, which marked the first proposal for compiling a National Language Dictionary. In 1919, the Preparatory Committee for National Language Unification was established, and a proposal to compile the dictionary, re-submitted by member Liu Fu (Ban Nong), was approved. The following year, the committee organized a National Language Dictionary Compilation Committee. In 1923, the Dictionary Compilation Office was officially established, but due to funding issues, full-scale work only began in 1928 after it was renamed the China Dictionary Compilation Office.

Over the next five years, the office collected material from 440 books and newspapers. In the first year, it produced 282,000 index cards; the second year, 403,000; the third year, 465,000; the fourth year, 800,000; and the fifth year, 550,000—totaling nearly 2.5 million cards. At the time, only the Oxford English Dictionary in the UK could match this scale of material collection for a dictionary project.

In March 1937, Volume I of the National Language Dictionary was published, covering the first seven letters of the Zhuyin Fuhao (phonetic symbols).

During the Sino-Japanese War, as Beijing fell, Li Jinxi and others left the city. In 1938, under the leadership of Wang Yi, the office continued compiling the dictionary under the new name “China Dictionary Compilation Office.” By autumn 1939, the remaining seven volumes of the National Language Dictionary were completed. Due to continued funding difficulties, the full eight-volume set was only published in 1945. However, since it was produced under Japanese occupation, many Japanese terms were included, leaving a mark of colonial influence.