Shuowen Jiezi - Shuowen Jiezi

A dictionary from the Later Han Dynasty in China. It is called Shuowen for short. It has 15 volumes and was written by Xu Shen. It has a preface from the 12th year of Yongyuan (100 AD) and is the oldest dictionary classified by character shape. The author collected a wide range of characters from before the Qin Dynasty (3rd century BCE), and obtained 9,353 basic characters and 1,163 variant characters. He analyzed these using the principles of the Six Scripts, classifying them into 540 parts and providing explanations and interpretations for each character to create this book. The basic characters are in the style of small seal script, and the variant characters include those from earlier styles in addition to small seal script. The "Six Scripts" refer to ideographic, pictographic, phono-semantic, compound ideographic, transliteration, and loanwords, of which the first four were used to analyze the components of characters (the last two are methods of using characters). The 540 sections of this work were gradually reorganized and merged in later generations, and in the Kangxi Dictionary there were 214 sections, but the principle of division has not changed since this work. However, since small seal script characters cannot count strokes, the characters in this work are arranged according to their meaning. This work was first revised by Xu Xuan in the Northern Song Dynasty, but prior to that his younger brother Xu Kai revised and annotated it. The work of each of these brothers was passed down to later generations, and in the Qing Dynasty it was highly valued as a book essential for elucidating pre-Qin documents, and many annotations were produced. Among them, Duan Yucai's Shuowen Jiezi Zhu (abbreviated as Shuowen Duan Zhu) is the most famous. In recent years, since the discovery of oracle bone inscriptions, the inadequacies in the analysis of this book have been emphasized, but this is an argument based on the premise that this book is a fundamental piece of written calligraphy, and does not in any way diminish the value of the book.

[Rai Yoshitsugu]

Source: Shogakukan Encyclopedia Nipponica About Encyclopedia Nipponica Information | Legend

中国、後漢(ごかん)の字書。略称『説文』。15編。許慎(きょしん)の著。永元12年（西暦100）の自序があり、字形によって分類した最古の字書。著者は秦(しん)（前3世紀）以前の文字を広く収集し、基本となる9353字、および異体字1163字を得、これを六書(りくしょ)の原理で分析し、540部に分類し、一文字ごとに説明・解釈を施して本書とした。基本となる文字は小篆(しょうてん)の字体であり、異体字は小篆のほかに、それ以前の字体のものを含む。「六書」とは、指事、象形、形声、会意、転注、仮借(かしゃ)をいい、このうち前四者が文字の構成要素の分析に用いられた（後二者は文字の運用法）。本書の540部は後世しだいに整理合併され、『康煕字典(こうきじてん)』では214部となるが、部分けの原則は本書以来、変わっていない。ただし、小篆の字体は筆画を数えることができないので、本書の部のなかの文字は、意味の関連で並べたものである。本書は北宋(ほくそう)の初め徐鉉(じょげん)が校訂したが、それに先だって弟の徐鍇(かい)が校訂・注釈を加えた。この兄弟それぞれの仕事が後世に伝わり、清(しん)代には先秦の文献の解明に必須(ひっす)の書として重んぜられ、幾多の注釈が現れた。なかでも段玉裁『説文解字注』（略称『説文段注』）がもっとも著名である。近年、甲骨文字が発見されて以来、本書の分析の不備が強調されるが、それは、本書が文字の書として基本的なものであることを前提としての論であり、本書の価値をすこしも減ずるものではない。

［頼　惟勤］

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