Jiezi

Jiezi is a term from Chinese philology that refers to the explanation and analysis of Chinese characters. It describes the scholarly practice of examining a character’s form, composition, meaning, and historical development to reveal how it is written and used.

Historically, the most famous reference associated with jiezi is the Shuowen Jiezi, compiled by Xu Shen in the early imperial period (around 100 CE). Shuowen Jiezi collects and explains thousands of Chinese characters, providing definitions, pronunciations as understood at the time, and notes on graphic composition. The work popularized a method of character analysis that breaks characters into semantic and phonetic components and organizes entries by structural features and shared elements.

The concept of jiezi has had a lasting influence on Chinese lexicography. It underpins later dictionaries and scholarly approaches to etymology, character formation, and paleography. In East Asia, the tradition of explaining characters continued to shape how dictionaries categorize and interpret script, informing scholarly and educational works well beyond China.

In modern contexts, jiezi remains a term used in philology and linguistics to describe etymological and structural analyses of Chinese characters. It is encountered in academic writing, historical dictionaries, and studies of Chinese writing systems, and it is often discussed in relation to classical works such as Shuowen Jiezi and the development of subsequent lexicographic traditions. See also Shuowen Jiezi.