《詩經》中「維」字，不論在字形、文法作用、與他詞複合、或詞義等方面都表現得十分複雜活躍。從胡適〈談談詩經〉一文指出「維」字的費解以來，除了在一些虛詞詞典零碎見到討論，但所論並不一致，而且時有錯誤，未見有人全面予以討論。本文歸納《詩經》中253個「維」字句，分析其字形有作「侯」、「唯」、「雖」、「維」，其文法作用有用為動詞、副詞、語助詞、繫詞、指示代詞、連接詞、介詞等，常複合成「維其」、「維以」、「維何」、「維伊何」、「維何期」、「維是」等形式，並一一為所有「維」字句釋義。

The character wei 維 in Book of Ode exhibits fairly complicated robustness with respect to its shape, grammatical function, and role in compounding and its lexical meaning. There has been no thorough treatment of the word wei save sporadic, divergent and occasionally flawed descriptions even since Hu Shih touched on its intractableness in his essay on Book of Ode. Based on a body of 253 sentences featuring wei 維, the paper factorizes its shape into hou 侯, wei 唯, sui 雖 and wei 維, identifies its wide range of grammatical uses as verb, adverb, particle, copular, demonstrative pronoun, conjunction and preposition, pins down its role in compounding yielding compounds such as. wei qi 維其, wei yi 維以, weihe 維何, wei yi he 維伊何, wei he qi 維何期, and wei shi 維是, and furnishes annotations of each and every sentence with wei 維.