The character 息 (xī): breath

A Chinese mountain village on a winter morning: brick houses under snowy tiled roofs, bare trees, a white peak and a golden sunrise sky. At the left an orange figure stands in profile on the frozen lane, in a coat and a knitted hat, a white plume of breath curling up from the mouth. At the right the character 息 in near black: an upright frame split into three cells by two bars, capped by a slanted stroke, above a wider lying curve with a hook and marks around it.
Pronunciation
xī
Strokes
10
Radical
心
Made of
自心

What it means

breath; news; interest (on an investment or loan); to cease; to stop; to rest; Taiwan pr. [xi2]

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen glosses this one as the breath and analyses it as 心 plus 自, with 自 also giving the sound. Now 自 is the nose, as its own page explains, and the heart was held to be the seat of life: the air that comes in through the nose and the beat in the chest, which is to say breathing. The sense of rest follows from the sense of breath, exactly as it does in English: to catch your breath is to stop.

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 自 of entry thirty-two set on the 心 of entry twenty-two, two characters already learned. The heart below spreads WIDER than the frame above and does not touch it, just as in 思; and its three small marks stay clear of its curve.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

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