Shuowen Jiezi - Contents and Importance

Contents and Importance

Xu Shen states in his postface that the Shuowen has 9,353 character entries, plus 1,163 graphic variants, with a total length of 133,441 characters. The transmitted texts vary slightly in content, owing to omissions and emendations by commentators (especially Xú Xuàn, see below), and modern editions have 9,431 characters and 1,279 variants. The Shuowen includes a Preface and 15 chapters. The first 14 chapters are character entries; the 15th and final chapter is divided into two parts: a postface and an index of section headers.

Xu wrote the Shuowen Jiezi to analyze seal script (specifically xiǎozhuàn 小篆 "small seal") characters that evolved slowly and organically throughout the mid-to-late Zhou dynasty in the state of Qin, and which were then standardized during the Qín dynasty and promulgated empire-wide. Even as copyists transcribed the main text of the book in clerical script in the late Han, and then in modern standard script in the centuries to follow, the small seal characters continued to be copied in their own (seal) script to preserve their structure, as were two kinds of variant graphs included by Xu, which he termed ancient script (gǔwén 古文) and Zhòu script (Zhòuwén 籀文, not to be confused with the Zhou Dynasty).

The guwen characters were conclusively shown by the leading scholar, Wang Guowei, to be anything but ancient; rather, they were regional variant forms from only slightly earlier, in the eastern areas during the Warring States period, thus making them contemporaneous with (not "ancient" compared to) the pre-unification Qín seal script. Note that Xu only included these "ancient" variants when they differed from standard seal. The Zhòu characters, now usually called large seal script (dàzhuàn 大篆 "large seal"), were taken from the no-longer extant Shĭ Zhòu Piān (史籀篇), an early copybook traditionally attributed to Shĭ Zhòu, or Historian Zhou, an official in the court of King Xuan of Zhou (r. 827-782 BCE).

Xu Shen did not know it at the time, but this "Zhòu script" dated from the late Western Zhōu Dynasty, and the "Zhòu script" was thus much older than the Warring States and Qin forms that he was analyzing. Later handwritten Shuowen versions copied the seal and ancient graphs, but wrote the definitions in the prevailing script in use (clerical script, regular script, etc.).

The typical Shuowen format for a character entry consists of a seal graph; a short definition (usually a single synonym, occasionally in a punning way as in the Shiming), pronunciation given by citing a homophone, and analysis of compound graphs into semantic and/or phonetic components. Individual entries can additionally include graphic variants, secondary definitions, information on regional usages, citations from pre-Han texts, and further phonetic information, especially in dúruò (讀若 "read like") notations (Coblin 1978).

Although the Shuowen Jiezi has had incalculable value to scholars and was traditionally relied upon as the most important Chinese etymological dictionary, many of its analyses and definitions have been eclipsed as vague or inaccurate since the discovery of oracle bone inscriptions in the late 19th century. It therefore can no longer be relied upon as the single, authoritative source for definitions and graphic etymologies. Xu Shen lacked access to oracle bone inscriptions from the Shāng Dynasty and bronzeware inscriptionss from the Shang and Western Zhou Dynasty, to which scholars now have access; they are often critical for understanding the structures and origins of logographs. For instance, he put lǜ (慮 "be concerned; consider") under the section heading 思 (sī "think") and noted it had a phonetic of hǔ (虍 "tiger"). However, the early bronze graphs for lǜ (慮) have the xīn (心 "heart") semantic component and a lǚ (呂 "a musical pitch") phonetic, also seen in early forms of lǔ (盧 "vessel; hut") and lǔ (虜 "captive").