The character 闻 (wén): to hear

A temple courtyard: a hall with grey tiled roofs on vermilion columns, pines at both sides. At the left a dark green bronze bell hangs from a red wooden frame, three blue green arcs widening away from it. Beside it an orange figure stands in profile, a hand cupped behind one ear. At the right the character 闻 in black: a dot, an upright, a bar across the top that hooks down at the right, and inside a frame of four bars, the last running out to the left.
Pronunciation
wén
Strokes
9
Level
HSK4
Radical
門
Made of
门耳

What it means

to hear; news; well-known; famous; reputation; fame; to smell; to sniff at

Where its shape comes from

The long form is written 聞, and Xu Shen analyses it as 耳, with 門 for the sound: the ear carries the meaning, the gate supplies the reading. The oldest forms show something else, and something far more vivid: a kneeling figure with a hand raised to an outsized ear. The 1956 simplification tucked the ear INSIDE the gate instead of setting it alongside; the work done by each piece did not change, and the gate still says nothing about the meaning.

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

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

A way to remember it

The frame of 问 and 间, open at the bottom, and inside it the 耳 of entry thirty-three. Its bottom bar juts well out to the left, as it does on its own page, but it stops short of the upright of the frame and never touches it.

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

Words it appears in

See the 11 HSK words built on 闻, grouped by level.

Writing it

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

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