| Large seal script | |
| Type: | Logographic |
| Fam1: | (Proto-writing) |
| Fam2: | Oracle bone script |
| Fam3: | Bronze script |
| Children: | Small seal script |
| Sample: | Song ding inscription.jpg |
| C: | 大篆 |
| P: | dàzhuàn |
| Tp: | dà-jhuàn |
The term large seal script traditionally refers to written Chinese dating from before the Qin dynasty—now used either narrowly to the writing of the Western and early Eastern Zhou dynasty (403 BCE), or more broadly to also include the oracle bone script . The term deliberately contrasts the small seal script, the official script standardized throughout China during the Qin dynasty, often called merely 'seal script'. Due to the term's lack of precision, scholars often prefer more specific references regarding the provenance of whichever written samples are being discussed.
During the Han dynasty (202 BCE220 CE), when clerical script became the popular form of writing, the small seal script was relegated to limited, formal usage, such as on signet seals and for the titles of stelae (inscribed stone memorial tablets which were popular at the time), and as such the earlier Qin dynasty script began to be referred to as 'seal script'. At that time, there remained knowledge of even older, often more complex glyphs dating to the middle-to-late Zhou dynasty, directly ancestral to the Qin forms—which resembled the Qin forms in their rounded style, as opposed to the rectilinear clerical script style prominent during the Han.[1] As a result, the 'large' and 'small' terms emerged to refer to the respective scripts. The Han-era Shuowen Jiezi dictionary credits sometimes traditionally identified with a group of characters from the Shizhoupian, preserved by their inclusion within the Shuowen Jiezi. Xu Shen, the latter text's author, included the variants differing from the structures of small seal script, and labelled the examples as (Chinese: 籀文), referring to the name of the original book, not the name of the dynasty or of a script