In Spoken Mandarin, most words are character compounds because over time Mandarin lost many sounds that existed in earlier forms of Chinese. Due to the loss of sounds, many Chinese words ended up becoming homophones, thus more characters were added to words to tell them apart. For example, the Chinese title of the poem "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" 施氏食狮史 is pronounced ""Shī Shì Shí Shī Shǐ"", and every character in the poem is pronounced with the same syllable, but with different tones. In older forms of Chinese, one could have been to tell apart the different characters making up the title, as they could have sounded noticeably different from each other.