The character 鱼 (yú): fish

A garden pond seen from above, its water clear turquoise, strewn with round lotus pads and one pink blossom, pale boulders resting along the edges. At the left an orange and cream carp with crisp scales and trailing fins swims toward the right. At the right, over the water, sits the character 鱼 in near black: a point on top, a box of four cells in the middle, and one long detached bar underneath.

Pronunciation: yú
Strokes: 8
Level: HSK2
Radical: 魚

What it means

fish (CL:條|条[tiao2],尾[wei3]); used in the names of various aquatic animals that are not fish (including abalone 鮑魚|鲍鱼[bao4yu2], alligators and crocodiles 鱷魚|鳄鱼[e4yu2] and octopi 章魚|章鱼[zhang1yu2])

Where its shape comes from

A whole fish standing on its tail: the point at the top is the head, the boxed middle is the body, and the stroke underneath is the tail fin. Xu Shen places the graph among the pictures of things, and remarks in passing that a fish's tail resembles a swallow's. The long form is written 魚 and ends in four dots, which stand here for that tail; the 1956 simplification replaced them with a single stroke.

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 魚, the traditional character: 鱼 is a twentieth-century simplification, found in no ancient corpus.

Oracle bone script 商
Clerical script 東漢
See all 19 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 point for the head, the box of 田 for the body, and one long bar for the tail. The fish stands upright, and it has to: Chinese characters sit inside a square, and a fish lying on its side would never fit in one.

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

Words it appears in

钓鱼 diào yú · HSK6 to fish (with line and hook); to angle; (fig.) to entrap; (Tw) to repeatedly nod one's head while dozing
鲨鱼 shā yú · HSK6 shark
双鱼座 shuāng yú zuò Pisces (constellation and sign of the zodiac)
鱼类 yú lèi fishes
鳄鱼 è yú alligator; crocodile (CL:條|条[tiao2])
金鱼 jīn yú goldfish

Writing it

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