Jyutping is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK), an academic group, in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanisation Scheme. The LSHK promotes the use of this romanisation system. 

The name "Jyutping" (itself the Jyutping romanisation of its Chinese name, 粵拼) is a contraction consisting of the first Chinese characters of the terms "Jyut6jyu5" (, meaning "Cantonese speech") and "ping3jam1" ( "phonetic alphabet"). The Jyutping system marks a departure from all previous Cantonese romanisation systems (approximately, 12 including Robert Morrison's pioneering work of 1828, and the widely used Standard Romanization, Yale and Sidney Lau systems) by introducing z and c initials and the use of eo and oe in finals, as well as replacing the initial y, used in all previous systems, with j. 

There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese. However, as three of the nine are entering tones (入聲, Jyutping: "jap6sing1"), which only appear in syllables ending with "p", "t", and "k", they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping (though they do in Cantonese Pinyin; these are shown in parentheses in the table below). Jyutping and the Yale Romanisation of Cantonese represent Cantonese pronunciations with the same letters in: But they differ in the following:
What does the Jyutping system depart from?
all previous Cantonese romanisation systems 