The character 云 (yún): cloud

A pale blue sky rises above steep Chinese mountains veiled in mist, with a red pavilion under tiered upturned roofs perched on a wooded crag at the lower left. On the left a huge cumulus billows upward in white and pale lilac, lit from behind. On the right, in the open sky, the character 云 in dark brown: a short bar, a longer bar beneath it, and below them a stroke that drops to the left, turns and runs back to the right, with a short diagonal in its hollow.
Pronunciation
yún
Strokes
4
Level
HSK4
Radical
二
Made of
二厶

What it means

cloud; CL:朵[duo3]

Where its shape comes from

The graph draws a curl of rising vapour coiling back on itself: the two strokes at the top stand for the sky, and the loop below them is the cloud. This is both the oldest form and the shortest one. When 云 was borrowed to write the verb "to say", 雨 (yǔ), rain, was set above it so that the cloud could still be told apart, producing 雲; the 1956 simplification tables went back to the short form. Today's character is therefore the older of the two as well.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE), which gives 云 as the ancient form of 雲; the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme (1956); 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

Two bars for the sky, and underneath them a loop that sets off leftwards, turns, comes back to the right, with a dot resting in its hollow. That loop is ONE single stroke, and it is exactly where the hand hesitates.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

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