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Herbert Allen Giles (8 December 1845 - 13 February 1935) was a British linguist who modified a Mandarin Chinese Romanization system established by Thomas Wade earlier, resulting in the Wade-Giles Chinese transliteration system.

Giles was a diplomat to China (1867 – 1892) as British Consul at Ningpo who later became the second professor of Chinese at Cambridge, succeeding Sir Thomas Wade, after living in Aberdeen, Scotland.

He spent a brief time at Fort Santo Domingo (1885-1888) in Tamsui, Taiwan.

He was the father of the sinologist Lionel Giles.

His publications include:

• Using Examples to Learn the Spoken Language (Yuxue Jiuyu) (1873)
• Using Examples to Learn the Written Language (Zixue Jiuyu) (1874)
• 'Chinese Sketches' Book Description: 204pp.,1876. First Edition. Giles, a scholar and linguist, is best known for his Chinese- English Dictionary, yet Chinese Sketches is an earlier and scarcer work. Work contains his early collection of short essays based upon his frequent travels to Chinese cities. (source abebooks.com)
• Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880, London)
  • English translation of 164 stories (out of 431) from Pu Songling's collection of ghost and fantastic folk tales, Liaozhai Zhiyi.
• The 1415-page A Chinese-English Dictionary (Hua-Ying Zidian) (1892, Shanghai; 1912, London)
  • containing Mandarin and nine southern dialects, such as Hakka, Cantonese, and Min
• Chuang Tzǔ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer (1926, Shanghai)
• The posthumously published, though never in English, encyclopedia, The Chinese and Their Food (Zhonghua Fanshi) (1947, Shanghai)
• Adversaria Sinica - From 1904 to 1915, the Shanghai publisher Kelley and Walsh published a series of Giles' scholarly papers, reviews, etc.

Postal map spelling is also based on the Wade-Giles system described in A Chinese-English Dictionary.