Shuowen Jiezi
說文解字 (Shuowen Jiezi)
Every Chinese character can be broken down into a small set of structural components and pictographic, ideographic, or phonetic principles, so understanding a word's true meaning requires first understanding the logic of how its written form was built.
- 540-radical organization of the Chinese script
- six-category theory of character formation
- first comprehensive Chinese dictionary
- foundation of later Chinese philology
The first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, organized under 540 graphic components ('radicals') and analyzing roughly 9,353 characters according to six categories of character formation, including pictographs, ideographs, and phono-semantic compounds, a classification still used by Chinese lexicography today. Compiled by the Eastern Han scholar Xu Shen, largely working from the seal-script forms current in his day rather than the oracle-bone or bronze forms unknown to him, it preserves character etymologies and pronunciations that are indispensable, if sometimes mistaken by modern standards, for reconstructing Old Chinese, and it remains the starting point for all later Chinese philology.
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