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.