秦文字에 대한 실물 자료는 거의 찾아볼 수 없었지만, 戰國末에서 秦初의 것으로 보이는 睡虎地秦簡이 출토됨으로 인해 秦簡文字에 대한 정리와 연구가 속출하고 있는데, 이는 秦이 六國을 통일하기까지의 文字현상을 이해하는 데 매우 중요한 근거 자료가 되고 있다. 秦簡文字는 古文字의 자형 특징을 그대로 보존하고 있기 때문에 古文字를 考釋하는데도 중요한 실마리가 되고 있으며 특히 대량의 異體字와 通假字 그리고 古今字와 同源字 등이 남아 있어 古文字와 古漢語를 연구하는데 중요한 자료가 되고 있다. 本稿에서는 秦簡文字에 나타난 古今字를 例擧하여 그 用例를 고찰해 보고자한다.

The original polygamous words are old words, and the new words formed after entry division are modern words. The newly-created characters are called "ancient and modern characters" together with the original characters which also represent the original meaning. The newly-created word is "modern word", and the original word that also represent the meaning is " ancient word", for example, the original meaning of the word "莫" is that the sun sets on the grass indicating sunset , evening and later the word "莫" was borrowed as negative indefinite pronoun and negative adverb. In order to avoid confusion in writing, "日" is added to "莫" to represent the meaning of evening, thus, "莫" and "暮" are formed as a pair of "ancient and modern characters". The so-called ancient and modern characters refer to differentiated ancient and modern characters and we call the characters before differentiation "ancient characters" and "modern characters" after differentiation, that is to say, ancient and modern characters are divided into two categories as follows: 1. Glyph construction For example, the sinner's sin "罪" is written with the word self "自" above, and the word "辛" below, which means tough or hard, however the latter word is no longer used. 2. From ancient time to the present Modern characters are based on ancient characters and ancient and modern characters are related to each other, for example, the word "债" which means debt, is written originally as "责" which means responsibility, 责 and 债 formed ancient and and modern characters. For another example, "反" and "返" which means Anti and Return, "反" is ancient character and "返" is modern character.