玉篇

《玉篇》是南梁顾野王所撰的一部声韵学方面的字书，共30卷，约公元543年出版。共有542部首，收字12158个，每个字给出反切注音与释义，少数有注释。

内容

《玉篇》之体例仿《说文解字》，共分542部，讲文字声韵，疏隶变之流。封演《闻见记》宣称《玉篇》共16917字。《玉篇》与《说文》不同，先出反切，点出读音，再引用《说文》之释义，价值更胜于《说文》。《玉篇》相较于《说文》，部首有增亦有减，少了〈哭〉〈延〉〈画〉〈敖〉等11部，多了〈父〉〈云〉〈喿〉〈冘〉〈处〉等13部。孙愐《唐韵序》说：“及案《三苍》《尔雅》《字统》《字林》《说文》《玉篇》……并列其中。”唐代高僧慧琳的《一切经音义》中引用了大量《玉篇》。

《玉篇》是《说文》后4个世纪以来收字最多的字典，还别收了这段时间新产生的上千个新字俗字，其中有许多被简化字采用。例如《玉篇》载“万”字有流行的俗字“万”，即被简化字采用。

白一平评价《玉篇》：

原本《玉篇》是一部有30卷的大作，唐宋时期涌现出许多缩略本和修订本，其中常杂有原反切；原书仅剩残卷(16917字中幸存约两千字)，传世《玉篇》不是构拟早期中古汉语音韵的可靠材料。

孙强含51129字的《玉篇》修订本（760年）篇幅不及原本158641字的三分之一。日本高僧空海将一本《玉篇》原本于806年带回日本，编成《篆隶万象名义》（830年），它也是现存最早的日本国语辞典。1013年，宋朝学者陈彭年编写校订本《大广益会玉篇》。

版本

顾氏原本在宋代已亡佚。今所传本已非顾氏原书，自唐孙强增加字数，宋陈彭年、吴𫟵、邱雍等又重修，称《大广益会玉篇》，共有22561字。

清黎庶昌出使日本，得唐写本四卷，注文甚详，未经增删，称为《玉篇零卷》。

The Yupian (Chinese: 玉篇; pinyin: Yùpiān; Wade–Giles: Yü-p'ien; "Jade Chapters") is a c. 543 Chinese dictionary edited by Gu Yewang (顧野王; Ku Yeh-wang; 519–581) during the Liang dynasty. It arranges 12,158 character entries under 542 radicals, which differ somewhat from the original 540 in the Shuowen Jiezi. Each character entry gives a fanqie pronunciation gloss and a definition, with occasional annotation.

The Yupian is a significant work in the history of Written Chinese. It is the first major extant dictionary in the four centuries since the completion of Shuowen and records thousands of new characters that had been introduced into the language in the interim. It is also important for documenting nonstandard súzì (俗字, "popular written forms of characters"), many of which were adopted in the 20th century as official simplified Chinese characters. For instance, the Yupian records that wàn (traditional 萬, "ten thousand, myriad") had a popular form of (simplified 万), which is much easier to write with three strokes versus thirteen.

Baxter describes the textual history:

The original Yùpiān was a large and unwieldy work of thirty juàn ["volumes; fascicles"], and during Táng and Sòng various abridgements and revisions of it were made, which often altered the original fănqiè spellings; of the original version only fragments remain (some two thousand entries out of a reported original total of 16,917), and the currently-available version of the Yùpiān is not a reliable guide to Early Middle Chinese phonology.

In 760, during the Tang dynasty, Sun Jiang (孫強; Sun Chiang) compiled a Yupian edition, which he noted had a total of 51,129 words, less than a third of the original 158,641. In 1013, Song dynasty scholar Chen Pengnian (陳彭年; Ch'en P'eng-nien) published a revised Daguang yihui Yupian (大廣益會玉篇; "Expanded and enlarged Jade Chapters"). The Japanese monk Kūkai brought an original version Yupian back from China in 806, and modified it into his c. 830 Tenrei Banshō Meigi, which is the oldest extant Japanese dictionary.

Kūkai's dictionary, when combined with other fragments of the unedited Yupian extant in Japan, has been used to reconstruct the original phonology of the Yupian. This reconstruction reveals that the Yupian had a phonology similar to the later Qieyun but did not make certain phonological distinctions found there, reflecting the variety of spoken language in the Southern Dynasties.