In academia, the parts outside the definitions in phonetic-semantic reference books are ambiguously termed, referred to as “revealed characters”, “word entries”, “lexical entries”, or “character entries”. Based on the meticulously revised Japanese manuscript of “Xuan Ying’s Phonetic-Semantic Explanations”, this paper conducts a comprehensive study on the origins of these parts, their relationship with the explanations, and their functions. It is discovered that this content not only originates from the scriptures but also from related prefaces or accompanying annotations. Their primary function is to “locate” and “identify the explained words”. Hence, they are termed as “label entries”. The function of the labels in “Xuan Ying’s Phonetic-Semantic Explanations” is to indicate the position of the interpreted terms in the scripture, and they do not form a relationship of interpretation and being interpreted with the exegesis as a whole.

Yi Qie Jing Yin Yi written by Xuan Ying of the Tang Dynasty is a model work of the sound and meaning of Buddhist sutras. At present, two collated editions have been published, but there are still many errors that have not been corrected. These errors can be divided into three types: primary errors, secondary version errors and other kinds of errors. Primary errors are annotation errors caused by the limitations of the author’s own knowledge; The secondary version errors refer to the errors added in the spreading of the book. Other kinds of errors are the errors that we can not determine whether they belong to the primary errors or secondary version errors according to the existing materials. Based on this classification, this paper lists several errors that were not reached by predecessors in the previous practice, in order to seek advice from others.