English: Page from chapter 3 of the Shuowen Jiezi, an ancient Chinese character dictionary, including a definition and analysis of the character 說 shuō.

Original text: 說釋也。从言。兑聲。"shuō means 'explain', from 言, 兑 duì sound." (Norman 1988:69)

The Old Chinese pronunciations of 說 and 兑 are reconstructed as *l̥jot and *l̥ots respectively (Baxter 1992:789, 755). The Song dynasty scholar Xu Xuan excised the 聲 marker, as the sounds no longer matched in his time, and added fanqie pronunciations (Boltz 1993:436).

• Baxter, William H. (1992), A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-012324-1.
• Boltz, William G. (1993), "Shuo wen chieh tzu", in Loewe, Michael (ed.), Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, pp. 429–442, ISBN 978-1-55729-043-4.
• Norman, Jerry (1988), Chinese, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.