The character 家 (jiā): home

On a cream ground the character 家 stands in dark brown, its strokes clean and even, before the facade of a Chinese house: a terracotta tile roof with upswept corners and a latticed window glowing yellow behind the strokes. At the lower left, well clear of the character, a small pink pig stands in profile, facing it.
Pronunciation
jiā
Strokes
10
Level
HSK1
Radical
宀
Made of
宀豕

What it means

home; family; (polite) my (sister, uncle etc); classifier for families or businesses; refers to the philosophical schools of pre-Han China; noun suffix for a specialist in some activity, such as a musician or revolutionary, corresponding to English -ist, -er, -ary or -ian; CL:個|个[ge4]

Where its shape comes from

The drawing admits of no doubt: a roof, and beneath it a pig, already there on the bone and bronze inscriptions. What the pig is doing there has been argued over for a long time. Xu Shen sees only an element chosen for its sound; Duan Yucai, who called the question a great riddle in 1815, reads it first as a pigsty; others see livestock housed under the dwelling. The formula repeated everywhere, a pig under a roof, therefore a home, settles a debate that is not settled.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); Duan Yucai, Shuowen Jiezi Zhu (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

A roof, and underneath it a farm animal. A home is the roof plus whatever lives below it: hold on to that picture and the character almost writes itself, the shelter first, then the creature sheltering under it.

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

Words it appears in

See the 43 HSK words built on 家, grouped by level.

Writing it

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

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