That is, the characters 買忽 are used to record the sound of the name, while the characters 水城 represent its meaning. From this, we infer that 買 and 忽 represent the pronunciations of local words for 'water' and 'city' respectively. In this way, a vocabulary of 80 to 100 words has been extracted from these place names. Characters like 買 and 忽 presumably represented pronunciations based on some local version of the Chinese reading tradition, but there is no agreement on what this sounded like. One approximation is to use the Middle Chinese reading pronunciations recorded in such dictionaries as the "Qieyun" (compiled in 601), in which 買 is pronounced "mɛ". Another uses the Sino-Korean readings of 15th century dictionaries of Middle Korean, yielding a pronunciation of "may" for the same character. In some cases, the same word is represented by several characters with similar pronunciations.