The character 相 (xiāng): to examine

A sunlit paved courtyard: a grey brick wall with tiled coping at the back, pierced by a round moon gate showing trees beyond, bamboo at the right, a lattice window at the far left. A small pine sits in a green glazed basin on a carved stone stand, and a flat terracotta orange figure in a long robe, hair in a bun and hands behind the back, leans toward it. At the right stands the character 相 in near black, a narrow 木 beside an upright frame of three cells.
Pronunciation
xiāng
Strokes
9
Radical
目
Made of
木目

What it means

each other; one another; mutually; fret on the neck of a pipa 琵琶[pi2 pa5] (a fret on the soundboard is called a 品[pin3])

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen breaks this one into two elements the course has already covered: to inspect, to look closely, from 目 and 木, the eye and the tree. His commentator Duan Yucai sharpens the idea in 1815 by quoting the Book of Changes: of everything one can observe on the earth, nothing rewards observation like a tree. The sense of mutually, the one a beginner meets first in words such as 相信 (xiāngxìn) or 互相 (hùxiāng), came later.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE) and Duan Yucai's commentary (1815); 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 characters already learned, shoulder to shoulder: 木 on the left, 目 on the right. The tree tightens to leave room, exactly as it does in 林: its last stroke, which ought to sweep down to the right, shrinks to a dot against the trunk.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

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