Similarly, the word wu which means “lie”, “falsely accuse”, or “malicious” is and was pronounced like the word for “witch” or “shaman”, 巫, which became the phonetic component of the word when it took on a written form, with “speech”, 言 added as signific. If we now note that witches were not trustworthy in ancient China we end up with a graph signifying “words of a witch”, 誣—but the graph is listed as a phonetic compound, not an ideograph. This example can be generalized: many so-called “phonetic” elements in complex Chinese characters also have semantic content, and often are even more meaning-indicative than the signific. Using similarly-sounding words to generate new meanings for one or more of them is called “paronomasia” (Ames 2008), and at times, homonyms or near-homonyms are used to define a word, a technique used in China’s first dictionary the Shuowen jiezi (ca. 1st century CE).