Shaanxi

Meaning

province China (country) with its capital at Xi'an and including the Wei River valley and the fertile southern half of the Ordos loop Loop, comprising much of the Loess Plateau.

From a modified form of the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of .
The double-a spelling, used certainly to avoid homography with Shanxi (, of shān rather than shǎn), is not a feature of Hanyu Pinyin and cannot be observed elsewhere. It is likely inherited from the pre-Pinyin Sin Wenz system devised and employed by Communist linguists, which was toneless and had designated "irregular spellings" to disambiguate tonally different words in cases where homography was clearly both unavoidable and undesirable. A Sin Wenz textbook from 1938 () explicitly lists the pairs Shaansi () and Shansi ().
An alternative theory is that the double-a spelling is from the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization system, where the third tone is spelled by doubling a vowel, but this is less likely considering the history of Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Sin Wenz, including the historical rivalry between the two systems.

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