The Hepburn romanization system is named after James Curtis Hepburn, who used it to transcribe the sounds of the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet in the third edition of his Japanese English dictionary, published in 1887. The system was originally proposed by the Society for the Romanization of the Japanese Alphabet in 1885. The Hepburn system was subsequently revised and called Sh sei Hebon-shiki R maji. This revised version was referred to as Hy jun-shiki R maji before. The original and revised variants of Hepburn remain the most widely used methods of transcription of Japanese. As Hepburn is based on English phonology, an English speaker unfamiliar with Japanese will generally pronounce a word romanized in Hepburn more accurately than a word romanized in the competing Kunrei-shiki R maji