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The Shuowen Jiezi (; "Explaining Simple and Analyzing Compound Characters") was an early 2nd century CE Chinese dictionary from the Han Dynasty. It was the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary, the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give the rationale behind the characters (sometimes also the etymology of the words represented by the characters), as well as the first to use the principle of organization by sections with shared components, called section headers (bùshǒu 部首).