The character 门 (mén): door

A Chinese courtyard gate seen head on: two vermilion leaves wide open, studded with rows of gold bosses, each with a gold lion head knocker, set in a carved grey stone frame. Between them, bright daylight, green foliage and a red hall at the far end of the courtyard. In the middle of that opening, the character 门 in very dark brown: a short slanting mark top left, an upright on the left, and a stroke running along the top that turns down the right and ends in a hook.

Pronunciation: mén
Strokes: 3
Level: HSK2
Radical: 門

What it means

gate; door; CL:扇[shan4]; gateway; doorway; CL:個|个[ge4]; opening; valve; switch; way to do something; knack; family; house; (religious) sect; school (of thought); class; category; phylum or division (taxonomy); classifier for large guns; classifier for lessons, subjects, branches of technology; (suffix) -gate (i.e. scandal; derived from Watergate)

Where its shape comes from

The older form is written 門 and draws two leaves side by side; Xu Shen analyses it as 戶 (hù), the single leaf, written twice. The short form used on the mainland today was not invented out of nothing: it takes up the cursive tracing of 門, straightened into regular script, and it is on that ground that it entered the simplification tables of 1956. Taiwan and Hong Kong still write 門.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme (1956); the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.

How it used to be written

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

Oracle bone script 商
Clerical script 東漢
See all 9 forms

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

A way to remember it

A small stroke set down at the top left, an upright on the left, then an upright on the right that finishes in a hook: the frame, and nothing underneath it. That first stroke touches neither of the other two.

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

Words it appears in

门口 mén kǒu · HSK2 doorway; gate; CL:個|个[ge4]
出门 chū mén · HSK2 to go out; to leave home; to go on a journey; away from home; (of a woman) to get married
门票 mén piào · HSK2 ticket (for theater, cinema etc)
部门 bù mén · HSK4 department; branch; section; division; CL:個|个[ge4]
专门 zhuān mén · HSK4 specialist; specialized; customized
上门 shàng mén · HSK4 to drop in; to visit; to lock a door; (of a shop) to close; to go and live with one's wife's family, in effect becoming a member of her family

See the 16 HSK words built on 门, grouped by level.

Writing it

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