The character 果 (guǒ): fruit

An orchard in front of a grey brick wall, with Chinese houses and tiled roofs and a blue cloudy sky beyond. At the left a peach tree in green leaf is loaded with pink and cream peaches, and two more have fallen in the grass. At the right, on the lawn, the character 果 in deep brown: a square divided into four cells, set on a long horizontal bar, a stem running down through the whole, and two slants spreading from the crossing.
Pronunciation
guǒ
Strokes
8
Radical
木
Made of
田木

What it means

fruit; result; resolute; indeed; if really

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen leaves nothing to guess at: "the fruit of a tree; from 木, picturing the shape of the fruit above the tree." The oracle bones show precisely that, a tree with three round shapes sitting in its branches. Those rounds have become the square divided into four cells, by the same regularisation that had already turned the mouth into a rectangle and the sun into a square, a brush being no good at circles.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); 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 you already know, one stacked on the other: 田 set on 木, with the vertical running through both from end to end. Just one bar inside the upper square, and the long bar at the foot is the widest line in the character.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

Share this page