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The character 出 (chū): to go out

The mouth of a cave in a karst landscape: at the left a high arch of grey rock, and through it turquoise water and a small pavilion with upturned roofs. Green bamboo grows at the right, over a pale flagstone pavement. On it a flat terracotta orange silhouette of a person walks in profile toward the arch, one leg ahead of the other. At the right the character 出 in dark brown: two cups nested on one stem, the lower much wider, its right upright dropping below the bottom bar.
Pronunciation
chū
Strokes
5
Level
HSK 2
Radical
凵
Made of
凵山

What it means

variant of 出[chu1] (classifier for plays or chapters of classical novels)

Where its shape comes from

The two stacked basins of today's character are not two mountains, and the resemblance is an accident of later tidying up. On the earliest inscriptions the graph shows a footprint, the one written 止 (zhǐ), coming out of a hollow, a pit or an enclosure: leaving a place. Xu Shen, who did not have those forms in front of him, read something quite different, "a plant growing up and out". The footprint reading is the one that prevails today, and neither of the two brings in any mountain.

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

A way to remember it

Two basins threaded on one and the same upright shaft: the upper basin has exactly the shape of 山 (shān), the mountain, and the lower one is the same again, only wider. The bottom bar is the LAST line of the character and the shaft stops there; only the short upright on the right runs a little below it.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

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