The so called “special characters”, is the characters that intended to represent a particular meaning. The concept of “special characters” has been developed for a long time, and as early as the Southern Tang Dynasty, Xu Kai’s (徐锴) interpretation of “lang (郎)” in the “Shuowen Jiezi Xizhuan 《( 說 文解字繫傳》)” already had the meaning of “special characters”. The Qing dynasty scholar Wang Yun (王筠) also discussed “special characters” many times. “Special characters” are exist more or less in various periods of Chinese characters, and “special characters” have appeared as early as the existence of oracle-bone inscriptions. This paper preliminarily sorts out the “special characters” in the oracle-bone inscriptions, and then groups these “special characters” and briefly sorts out the configuration of each group of characters, in order to have a comprehensive understanding of the development of “special characters” in the oracle-bone inscriptions. On the basis of analyzing their use in combination with the example and context, the “special characters” in the oracle-bone inscriptions are compared with the “special characters” in Dongba script, and it is found that these “special characters” have distinctive characteristics when used. The “special characters” in the oracle-bone inscriptions are often accompanied by partial changes in the shape structure, and the frequency of their use is unbalanced. When “special characters” are used, there is often a situation where a character represents a phrase, the use of “special characters” is often limited by superordinate level semantics and it will gradually be unified into a glyph in the later stage. Finally, combined with the production and development process of Chinese characters, we find that the production of “special characters” is a natural manifestation in the process of writing development, which is closely related to the context of the use of oracle-bone inscriptions and the thinking habits of primitive ancestors.

The people of Shang Dynasty were superstitious, advocating ghosts and gods. They liked divination to ask the gods for anything, and used this to judge the good and bad. Therefore, ‘disaster’ and ‘auspicious’ are two very important aspects of divination. For the words about disaster in oracle-bone inscriptions, the predecessors have done more systematic studies. However, there is relatively little systematic research on words related to ‘auspicious’. So this paper focuses mainly on the words that few scholars have discussed before, and compares their glyphs, meanings, modified things and grammatical aspects between oracle-bone inscriptions and bronze ones. After the systematic comparison and analysis, it draws the following conclusions. First, in terms of the glyphs and meanings, the components and combinations of the words in the oracle-bone inscriptions are mostly stable, but the meaning extension method is simple and very imperfect. Second, in terms of the types of things modified, and in comparison with the category of the bronze inscriptions, that of the oracle-bone ones is more and more detailed, and at the same time, the focus of the oracle-bone ones is different from the ‘person’ to which the bronze ones pay attention as the focus of them is on the ‘event itself’. Last, in terms of grammatical functions, the words are more independent in the oracle-bone inscriptions than in the bronze ones, having the usage of single-word sentences. But they cannot be used as attributives, and the stability of grammatical functions is not as good as that in the bronze ones. Through the analyses and conclusions above, this paper shows the synchronic distribution, the diachronic development, and the characteristics of the words in the oracle-bone inscriptions in a comprehensive way. It also demonstrates the ideology and culture of Shang Dynasty and Zhou Dynasty, which can be summed up as ‘from the theocracy-centered to the ruled-by-men’.