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 (c. 1046 – 403 BCE), or more broadly to also include the oracle bone script (c. 1250 – c. 1000 BCE).

Due to the term's lack of precision, scholars often prefer more specific references regarding the provenance of whichever written samples are being discussed.

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.

The Han-era Shuowen Jiezi dictionary (c. 100 CE) credits sometimes traditionally identified with a group of characters from the Shizhoupian (c. 800 BCE), 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 zhòuwén (籀文), referring to the name of the original book, not the name of the dynasty or of a script