The character 美 (měi): beautiful

A hillside meadow at sunrise: flowered green grass, blue grey hills, a golden sky with the sun on the horizon. At the left an orange figure faces us, arms spread wide, in a patterned robe with fringed sleeves and a fret belt, wearing a tall headdress of two ivory ram horns curling outward and cream and gold feathers standing between them. At the right the character 美 in near black: two short strokes on top, three bars crossed by a stem, then a wider bar and two strokes crossing below.
Pronunciation
měi
Strokes
9
Level
HSK4
Radical
羊
Made of
羊大

What it means

beautiful; very satisfactory; good; to beautify; to be pleased with oneself

Where its shape comes from

Two readings share this character, and the reference works print them side by side. Xu Shen analyses it as 羊 plus 大 and glosses it as tasty: a big sheep is good to eat, and beauty is a matter of the tongue before it is a matter of the eye. Palaeographers read the ancient forms otherwise, as a person wearing a headdress of horns or feathers, that is, someone dressed up. Neither reading has been settled.

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

How it used to be written

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 top of 羊 set on 大, two characters already learned. WATCH THE UPRIGHT: in 羊 it crosses the last bar and juts out below; here it stops on the third bar, and 大 takes over underneath, with its own bar and its two slanting legs.

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

Words it appears in

See the 29 HSK words built on 美, grouped by level.

Writing it

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

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