The character 问 (wèn): to ask

A grey brick lane ends at a courtyard gate in warm afternoon light: a carved pale stone surround under dark tiles, two closed vermilion doors each with a gold lion mask knocker, a green tree above the wall. At the left a flat terracotta orange traveller stands in profile, wide brimmed hat and a big bundle on his back, an arm raised toward the door. On the brick at the right the character 问 in deep brown, a frame open at the foot with a small empty square hanging inside.
Pronunciation
wèn
Strokes
6
Level
HSK1
Radical
門
Made of
门口

What it means

to ask; to inquire

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen treats this as a sound compound: "to enquire; from 口, with 門 for the pronunciation." The mouth carries the meaning and the gate supplies the sound: 问 is read wèn where 门 is read mén, which is the ordinary sort of resemblance between a character and its phonetic element. The scene one pictures, somebody knocking at a door to ask a question, is therefore not what the source claims, useful though it is for remembering the graph.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.

How it used to be written

These are the forms of 問, the traditional character: 问 is a twentieth-century simplification, found in no ancient corpus.

Forms, sources and dates: the 字形演變 database of 小學堂, Academia Sinica, public domain (CC0).

A way to remember it

The frame of 门, the gate learned in the seventh row, and inside it the 口 of the sixth. The square TOUCHES NOTHING: not the bar above it, not the left upright, not the right one. The space around it belongs to the character.

This is a memory aid, not the origin of the character.

Words it appears in

See the 17 HSK words built on 问, grouped by level.

Writing it

See the stroke order of 问, animated stroke by stroke.

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