Yupian

thumb|Ming dynasty 1492 reprint of the Yupian thumb|300px|Vol. 27 of the Yupian in Ishiyama-dera, [[Ōtsu, Japan (facsimile)]] The Yupian (; "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.