In the beginning was the Word.

— Bible.

When Ts’ang Chieh first created writing (shu), he probably imitated the forms according to their categories; so the figures were called “designs” (wen). Later, when the writings were increased by combining the forms and phonetics, the results were called “compound graphs” (tzu).

— Xu Shen. “Postface of the shuo-wen chieh-tzu: the first comprehensive Chinese dictionary.” Trans. K. L. Thern