编辑情况

许慎，字叔重，汝南召陵（今河南郾城东北）人。师事贾逵，受古文经学，为马融所推崇，时人誉称「五经无双许叔重」。举孝廉，历任校长、太尉阁祭酒。所著有《说文解字》和《五经异义》。《说文解字》始作于汉和帝永元十二年(100年)，前后经历二十馀年，至汉安帝建光元年(121年)，许慎卧病在床，才由其子许冲进上；而《五经异义》已佚，清人陈寿祺《五经异义疏证》辑注较备。

许慎于《说文解字叙》中指出：「古者庖羲氏之王天下也，仰则观象于天，俯则观法于地，视鸟兽之文与地之宜，近取诸身，远取诸物；于是始作易八卦，以垂宪象。及神农氏，结绳为治，而统其事。」由于古人没有文字，只用结绳等方法来记事，以致「庶业其繁，饰伪萌生」。及至仓颉造字，才使「百工以乂，万品以察」。然而，随著文字的演变，而时人又「虽有尉律不课，小学不修」，加上假借字的普遍，使许多字已失去了本义，或者出现误用的情况。为了「解谬误，晓学者，达神恉」，许慎遂作《说文解字》。

《说文解字》的书名，许慎这样解释：「仓颉之初作书也，盖依类象形，故谓之文。其后形声相益，即谓之字。文者，物象之本；字者，言孳乳而寖多也。」

版本

原书现已散佚，但其中大量内容被汉朝以后的其他书籍引用，并有北宋徐铉于雍熙三年（986年）校订完成的版本（称为「大徐本」）流传至今。宋以后的说文研究著作多以此为蓝本，例如清朝的段玉裁注释本。

19世纪以来，唐朝中期的写本《说文解字》木部残卷和口部残叶被发现，它们是目前可见的最早的《说文解字》版本。

体制

东汉许慎撰著的《说文解字》，是中国第一部按照偏旁部首编排的字典，也是世界上最早的字书之一。它首立部首排列法，以六书理论解释字形、字义、字音及其互相关系的汉语字典，开创后世字典编排、查检的先河﹔保存了上古丰富的文字资料﹔阐发了前人的六书说，并首先运用六书理论分析汉字的形体构造，因形说义，因声求源，是人们认识、掌握上古语音、词汇和读通先秦两汉古籍的重要工具书。此外，《说文解字》释字时往往先列出小篆，如果古文和籀文不同，则在后面列出。然后解释这个字的本义，再解释字形与字义或字音之间的关系。总括而言，《说文解字》是科学文字学和文献语言学的奠基之作，在中国语言学史上有极其重要的地位。

内容编排

关于《说文解字》的编排，《说文解字序》说：「此十四篇，五百四十部，九千三百五十三文，重一千一百六十三，解说凡十三万三千四百四十一字。」由此可见，本书分为十四篇，另加序一篇，共十五篇。篇下开列部首，如第一篇有部首十四个。部首统摄字，有九千三百五十三个﹔字之下加解说，包括意思，读音等，解说时又附以古文、籀文、俗字、奇字等异体字，称重文，合计一千一百六十三个。

在北宋时期，徐铉等人作了校订。其中在校订中对原书的编排作了一些改动和补充。包括：

• 把原书十四篇各分上下

• 增加反切

• 增加注释

• 增加了一些见于古代典籍的文字——新附字。

那么如此众多的被解释字是怎样有系统地组织在一起的呢？作者的编排原则是甚么？这里牵涉两个编排的原则。第一是关于部首之间的排列次序﹔第二是每部首之下统摄之字的排列方法。这在《说文解字序》里也有说明：

又说：

段玉裁说：「凡部首之先后，以形之相近为次﹔凡每部中字之先后，以义之相引为次……」

《说文》全书十五篇，正文十四篇，共收正字九千三百五十三个，重文一千一百六十三个，许慎按照不同的表意或表声偏旁（多数为表意偏旁），把这些篆体汉字分为五百四十部。例如从木（以木为偏旁）的字 ，如楷、梫、桂、棠、杜、槢、樿等，都放在木部。从水的字（以水为偏旁），「河、泑、涷、涪、潼、江、沱」等，都放在水部。如此等等，这就是「分别部居」。

评价及贡献

历代不少学者都曾研究《说文解字》，当中尤以清朝时研究最为兴盛。段玉裁的《说文解字注》、朱骏声的《说文通训定声》、桂馥的《说文解字义证》、王筠的《说文句读》尤备推崇，四人也获尊称为「说文四大家」。

说文对于文字学贡献，在于网罗当时许多的小篆、籀文、古文等古代文字，著眼于本形本义，保存当时的文字说解，不仅为第一部文字学钜著，事实上两千多年来的文字学便是说文之学。

Circumstances of compilation

Xu Shen, a Han Dynasty scholar of the Five Classics, compiled the Shuowen Jiezi. He finished editing it in 100 CE, but due to an unfavorable imperial attitude towards scholarship, he waited until 121 CE before having his son Xǔ Chōng present it to Emperor An of Han along with a memorial.

In analyzing the structure of characters and defining the words represented by them, Xu Shen strove to disambiguate the meaning of the pre-Han Classics, so as to render their usage by government unquestioned and bring about order, and in the process also deeply imbued his organization and analyses with his philosophy on characters and the universe. According to Boltz (1993:430), Xu's compilation of the Shuowen "cannot be held to have arisen from a purely linguistic or lexicographical drive." His motives were more pragmatic and political. During the Han era, the prevalent theory of language was Confucianist Rectification of Names, the belief that using the correct names for things was essential for proper government. Xu's postface (xù 叙) to the Shuowen Jiezi (tr. O'Neill 2013: 436) explains: "Now, as for writing systems and their offspring characters, these are the root of the classics, the origin of kingly government, what former men used to hand down to posterity, and what later men use to remember antiquity." Compare how the postface describes the legendary invention of writing for governmental rather than for communicative purposes:

The Scribe of the Yellow Emperor, Cangjie, observing the traces of the footprints and tracks of birds and wild animals, understood that their linear structures could be distinguished from one another by the differences between them. When he first created writing by carving in wood, the hundred officials became regulated, and the myriad things became discriminated. (tr. O'Neill 2013: 430)

Pre-Shuowen Chinese dictionaries like the Erya and the Fangyan were limited lists of synonyms loosely organized by semantic categories, which made it difficult to look up characters. Xu Shen analytically organized characters in the comprehensive Shuowen Jiezi through their shared graphic components, which Boltz (1993:431) calls "a major conceptual innovation in the understanding of the Chinese writing system."

Structure

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 Qin dynasty and promulgated empire-wide. Thus, Needham et al. (1986: 217) describe the Shuowen jiezi as "a paleographic handbook as well as a dictionary".

The dictionary 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. Xǔ Shèn states in his postface that the dictionary 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 9,831 characters and 1,279 variants.

Sections

Xu Shen categorized Chinese characters into 540 sections, under "section headers" (bùshǒu, now the standard linguistic and lexicographical term for character radicals): these may be entire characters or simplifications thereof, which also serve as components shared by all the characters in that section. The number of section headers, 540, numerologically equals 6 × 9 × 10, the product of the symbolic numbers of Yin and Yang and the number of the Heavenly Stems. The first section header was 一 (yī "one; first") and the last was 亥 (hài, the last character of the Earthly Branches).

Xu's choice of sections appears in large part to have been driven by the desire to create an unbroken, systematic sequence among the headers themselves, such that each had a natural, intuitive relationship (e.g., structural, semantic or phonetic) with the ones before and after, as well as by the desire to reflect cosmology. In the process, he included many section headers that are not considered ones today, such as 炎 (yán "flame") and 熊 (xióng "bear"), which modern dictionaries list under the 火 or 灬 (huǒ "fire") heading. He also included as section headers all the sexagenary cycle characters, that is, the ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches. As a result, unlike modern dictionaries which attempt to maximize the number of characters under each section header, 34 Shuowen headers have no characters under them, while 159 have only one each. From a modern lexicographical perspective, Xu's system of 540 headings can seem "enigmatic" and "illogical". For instance, he included the singular section header 409 惢 (ruǐ "doubt"), with only one rare character (ruǐ 繠 "stamen"), instead of listing it under the common header 408 心 (xīn "heart; mind").

Character entries

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), a 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, typically in dúruò (读若 "read like") notation.

In addition to the seal graph, Xu included two kinds of variant graphs when they differed from the standard seal, called ancient script (gǔwén 古文) and Zhòu script (Zhòuwén 籀文, not to be confused with the Zhou dynasty).

The Zhòu characters were taken from the no-longer extant Shizhoupian, an early copybook traditionally attributed to a Shĭ Zhòu, or Historian Zhou, in the court of King Xuan of Zhou (r. 827–782 BCE). Wang Guowei and Tang Lan argued that the structure and style of these characters suggested a later date, but some modern scholars such as Qiu Xigui argue for the original dating.

The guwen characters were based on the characters used in pre-Qin copies of the classics recovered from the walls of houses where they had been hidden to escape the burning of books ordered by Qin Shihuang. Xu believed that these were the most ancient characters available, since Confucius would have used the oldest characters to best convey the meaning of the texts. However, Wang Guowei and other scholars have shown that they were regional variant forms in the eastern areas during the Warring States period, from only slightly earlier than the Qin seal script.

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 the guwen and Zhouwen characters.

Character analysis

The title of the work draws a basic distinction between two types of characters, wén 文 and zì 字, the former being those composed of a single graphic element (such as shān 山 "mountain"), and the latter being those containing more than one such element (such as hǎo 好 "good" with 女 "woman" and 子 "child") which can be deconstructed into and analyzed in terms of their component elements. Note that the character 文 itself exemplifies the category wén 文, while 字 (which is composed of 宀 and 子) exemplifies zì 字. Thus, Shuōwén Jiězì means "commenting on" (shuō "speak; talk; comment; explain") the wén, which cannot be deconstructed, and "analyzing" (jiě "untie; separate; divide; analyze; explain; deconstruct") the zì.

Although the "six principles" of Chinese character classification (liùshū 六书 "six graphs") had been mentioned by earlier authors, Xu Shen's postface was the first work to provide definitions and examples. He uses the first two terms, simple indicatives (zhǐshì 指事) and pictograms (xiàngxíng 象形) to explicitly label character entries in the dictionary, e.g., in the typical pattern of "(character) (definition) ...simple indicative" (A B 也...指事 (也)). Logographs belonging to the third principle, phono-semantic compound characters (xíngshēng 形声), are implicitly identified through the entry pattern A… from B, phonetically resembles C (A...从 B, C 声), meaning that element B plays a semantic role in A, while C gives the sound. The fourth type, compound indicatives (huìyì 会意), are sometimes identified by the pattern A...from X from Y (A...从 X 从 Y), meaning that the compound A is given meaning through the graphic combination and interaction of both constituent elements. The last two of the six principles, borrowed characters (aka phonetic loan, jiǎjiè 假借) and derived characters (zhuǎnzhù 转注), are not identifiable in the character definitions.

According to Imre Galambos, the function of the Shuowen was educational. Since Han studies of writing are attested to have begun by pupils of 8 years old, Xu Shen's categorization of characters was proposed to be understood as a mnemonic methodology for juvenile students.

Textual history and scholarship

Although the original Han dynasty Shuōwén Jiězì text has been lost, it was transmitted through handwritten copies for centuries. The oldest extant trace of it is a six-page manuscript fragment from the Tang dynasty, amounting to about 2% of the entire text. The fragment, now in Japan, concerns the mù (木) section header. The earliest post-Han scholar known to have researched and emended this dictionary, albeit badly, was Lǐ Yángbīng (李阳冰, fl. 765–780), who "is usually regarded as something of a bête noire of Shuowen studies," writes Boltz, "owing to his idiosyncratic and somewhat capricious editing of the text."

Shuowen scholarship improved greatly during the Southern Tang-Song dynasties and later during the Qing dynasty. The most important Northern Song scholars were the Xú brothers, Xú Xuàn (徐铉, 916–991) and Xú Kǎi (徐锴, 920–974). In 986, Emperor Taizong of Song ordered Xú Xuàn and other editors to publish an authoritative edition of the dictionary.

This was published as the 説文解字系传 Shuowen Jiezi xichuan.

Xu Xuan's textual criticism has been especially vital for all subsequent scholarship, since his restoration of the damage done by Lǐ Yángbīng resulted in the closest version we have to the original, and the basis for all later editions. Xu Kai, in turn, focused on exegetical study, analyzing the meaning of Xu Shen's text, appending supplemental characters, and adding fǎnqiè pronunciation glosses for each entry. Among Qing Shuowen scholars, some like Zhū Jùnshēng (朱骏声, 1788–1858), followed the textual criticism model of Xu Xuan, while others like Guì Fù (桂馥, 1736–1805) and Wáng Yún (王筠, 1784–1834) followed the analytical exegesis model of Xu Kai. One Qing scholar, Duan Yucai, stands above all the others due to the quality of his research in both areas. His annotated Shuowen edition (Shuowen Jiezi Zhu) is the one most commonly used by students today.

Although the Shuowen Jiezi has had incalculable value to scholars and was traditionally relied upon as the most important early source on the structure of Chinese characters, 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 derivations. Xu Shen lacked access to oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty and bronzeware inscriptions 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 (虑 "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 (虑) have the xīn (心 "heart") semantic component and a lǚ (吕 "a musical pitch") phonetic, also seen in early forms of lǔ (卢 "vessel; hut") and lǔ (虏 "captive").

Scholarship in the 20th century offered new understandings and accessibility. Ding Fubao collected all available Shuowen materials, clipped and arranged them in the original dictionary order, and photolithographically printed a colossal edition. Notable advances in Shuowen research have been made by Chinese and Western scholars like Mǎ Zōnghuò (马宗霍), Mǎ Xùlún (马叙伦), William G. Boltz, Weldon South Coblin, Thomas B.I. Creamer, Paul Serruys, Roy A. Miller, and K.L. Thern.