Shuowen Jiezi, compiled by Xu Shen in the Eastern Han Dynasty, is the earliest dictionary in China, which has been compiled for more than ten years. Its purpose is to popularize Chinese character culture, promote the standardization and standardization of Chinese characters, and lay a foundation for future Chinese character learning by explaining and annotating the origin, meaning and usage of Chinese characters. Known as "the best book in the world".
When compiling this masterpiece, Xu Shen highly praised the method of Shuowen, that is, explaining and annotating the origin, old meaning, new meaning, polyphony and usage of each Chinese character in detail, so that readers can understand the origin, evolution and cultural background of Chinese characters. He attached great importance to the collection and arrangement of ancient books and materials, and selected a large number of ancient books and materials such as Erya, Shi Mao and Zhouyi, and also comprehensively arranged various ancient patterns to get their true meaning.
The Influence of Shuowen Jiezi
First, Shuowen Jiezi distinguishes its radicals and radicals from tens of thousands of Chinese characters and classifies them into 540 categories, which opens the way for Chinese Dictionary to arrange Chinese characters by radicals. Today, Chinese dictionaries and dictionaries are still arranged by radical indexing.
Second, Shuowen Jiezi first expounded the content of "Six Books" in the exegetical content, which runs through the principles of Six Books. Xu Shen defined six books respectively and cited examples. Later generations used Xu Shen's name and definition to explain the Six Books.
Thirdly, Shuo Wen Jie Zi contains many ways to write Chinese characters. At that time, in addition to the seal script of the Han Dynasty, there were different writing methods such as Wen Shu and ancient prose. Most of these fonts are hieroglyphics. This provides valuable ancient writing materials for the study of Chinese characters, and also provides great convenience for the study of the original meaning of ancient writing.
Fourthly, Shuowen Jiezi has preserved a large number of ancient phonetic materials, which is of great value to the study of Chinese phonetic history, especially the study of ancient phonology.
The above contents refer to Baidu Chinese translation words.