| s-1
| Early life |
| s-2
| Born in Tianjin with ancestry in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, Chao went to the United States with a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship in 1910 to study mathematics and physics at Cornell University, where he was a classmate and lifelong friend of Hu Shih, the leader of the New Culture Movement. |
| s-3
| He then became interested in philosophy, and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1918 with a dissertation entitled 'Continuity: Study in Methodology'. |
| s-4
| Already in college his interests had turned to music and languages. |
| s-5
| He spoke German and French fluently and some Japanese, and he had a reading knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin. |
| s-6
| He served as Bertrand Russell's interpreter when Russell visited China in 1920. |
| s-7
| In his My Linguistic Autobiography, he wrote of his ability to pick up a Chinese dialect quickly, without much effort. |
| s-8
| Chao possessed a natural gift for hearing fine distinctions in pronunciation that was said to be 'legendary for its acuity', enabling him to record the sounds of various dialects with a high degree of accuracy. |
| s-9
| Career development and later life |
| s-10
| He returned to China in 1920, marrying the physician Yang Buwei there that year. |
| s-11
| The ceremony was simple, rather than the noisy traditional wedding, attended only by Hu Shih and one other friend. |
| s-12
| Hu's account of it in the newspapers made the couple a model of modern marriage for China's New Culture generation. |
| s-13
| Chao taught mathematics at Tsinghua University and, one year later, returned to the United States to teach at Harvard. |
| s-14
| He again returned to China in 1925, teaching at Tsinghua, and beginning a survey of the Wu dialects in 1926. |
| s-15
| He began to conduct linguistic fieldwork throughout China for the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica from 1928 onwards. |
| s-16
| During this period of time, he collaborated with Luo Changpei and Li Fang-Kuei, the other two leading Chinese linguists of his generation, to edit and render into Chinese Bernhard Karlgren's monumental Etudes sur la Phonologie Chinoise (published in 1940). |
| s-17
| He left for the US in 1938, and resided there afterwards. |
| s-18
| In 1945, he served as president of the Linguistic Society of America, and a special issue of the society's journal Language was dedicated to him in 1966. |
| s-19
| He became an American citizen in 1954. |
| s-20
| In the 1950s he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research. |
| s-21
| From 1947 to 1960, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, where in 1952, he became Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages. |
| s-22
| Both Chao and Yang were known for their good senses of humor, he particularly for his love of subtle jokes and language puns: they published a family history entitled, Life with Chaos: the autobiography of a Chinese family. |
| s-23
| Late in his life, he was invited by Deng Xiaoping to return to China in 1981. |
| s-24
| Previously at the invitation of Premier Zhou En-Lai, Chao and his wife returned to China in 1973 for the first time since the 1940s. |
| s-25
| He visited China again between May and June in 1981 after his wife died in March the same year. |
| s-26
| He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
| s-27
| His first daughter Rulan Chao Pian (1922 - 2013) was Professor of East Asian Studies and Music at Harvard. |
| s-28
| His third daughter Lensey, born in 1929, is a children's book author and mathematician. |