Shuowen Jiezi, referred to as Shuowen, is the first Chinese dictionary arranged by radicals in China. Editor-in-Chief of Xu Shen in Han Dynasty. The original work, written from 100 to 12 1, has been lost. Most of the versions handed down to this day are Song Dynasty versions or Duan Yucai's annotations in Qing Dynasty. The original text is Xiao Zhuan, which explains the source of the font word for word. Written by Xu Shen, dedicated to Han Andi. The whole book is divided into 540 radicals, 9,353 words, and there are also "overlapping words", that is, the variant characters 1 163, * * 105 16.
Erya is the first monograph to explain the meaning of words in China, and it is also the first dictionary compiled according to the meaning system and the classification of things in China. As a book title, "er" means "near" (later written as "er"), "elegant" means "positive", especially "elegant speech" here, that is, it meets the standards in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.