Shiming

The 1,502 definitions attempt to establish semantic connections based upon puns between the word being defined and the word defining it, which is often followed with an explanation. For example, chapter 12 contains:

愛哀也愛乃思念之也
Love is sorrow. If you love, then you remember fondly.

The Chinese call these paronomastic glosses shengxun 'sound teaching', which goes back to the Rectification of Names, which hypothesized a connection between names and reality. The Shiming preface explains this ancient Chinese theory of language.

In the correspondence of name with reality, there is in each instance that which is right and proper. The common people use names every day, but they do not know the reasons why names are what they are. Therefore I have chosen to record names for heaven and earth, [yin and yang], the four seasons, states, cities, vehicles, clothing and mourning ceremonies, up to and including the vessels commonly used by the people, and have discussed these terms intending to explain their origin.[1]

There is controversy whether this dictionary's author was Liu Xi (劉熙; fl. c. 200 CE) or the more famous Liu Zhen (劉珍; d. 126 CE). The earliest reference to the Shiming is a criticism in the late 3rd-century Records of Three Kingdoms biography of Wei Zhao (韋昭; 204–273); while in prison, Wei wrote a supplement to Liu Xi's Shiming because it lacked information on official titles. The next reference is in the mid-5th century Book of the Later Han biography of Liu Zhen, which notes that he wrote an otherwise unknown Shiming in 30 chapters. The received text has 8 volumes and 27 sections that the Shiming preface, written in Liu Xi's name, calls 27 chapters. Bibliographies in official histories simply listed the Shiming as having eight fascicles without mentioning the number of chapters. The Ming dynasty scholar Zheng Mingxuan (鄭明選; fl. 1572–1620) questioned the difference in chapters and doubted the book's authenticity. The Qing-era commentator Bi Yuan (畢沅; 1730–1797), who published the 1789 Shiming shuzheng (釋名疏證 'Exegetical evidence for Shiming') critical edition, believed that the work was begun by Liu Zhen and completed by Liu Xi who added his preface. Another Qing scholar Qian Daxin (錢大昕; 1728–1804) concurred that Liu Xi was the author based upon studies of his students' biographies. Based on internal evidence Bodman concludes "[i]t is not impossible that Liu Zhen did compose such a work and that Liu Xi might have used some of its material in his work, but the chance of this having happened is very small".[2] The date of the Shiming is almost as controversial as its author. However, it is undisputed that Liu Xi lived at the end of the Eastern Han dynasty and was a refugee who fled to Jiaozhou (present-day Hanoi) from the turmoil between the Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 and the dynasty's collapse in 220.

From this table of contents, the Shiming clearly followed the Erya's organization into semantically arranged chapters and all their titles begin with the word shì 'explain'.

• Xiao Erya
• Guangya
• Piya

• 釋名 [Shiming] (in Chinese). Retrieved 2024-04-04 – via the Chinese Text Project.