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The character 间 (jiān): interval

A grey brick wall capped with dark tiles at dusk, under a mauve and pink sky. Set into it, two tall vermilion doors stand almost shut, held apart by a thin vertical slit from which a band of cream light falls across the paving. A slender crescent moon hangs high at the right. On the wall the character 间 in near black, the same frame open at the foot, and inside it, touching nothing, an upright rectangle split by a single bar.
Pronunciation
jiān
Strokes
7
Radical
門
Made of
门日

What it means

between; among; within a definite time or space; room; section of a room or lateral space between two pairs of pillars; classifier for rooms

Where its shape comes from

The long form is 閒, and what stands in the opening there is not the sun but the moon. Xu Shen glosses the word as "a crack" and notes "from 門 and 月": moonlight slipping between two leaves of a door left ajar. The 日 written today comes from the later variant 間, which the 1956 simplification kept while shortening the gate. The moon belongs to the history of this character, then, and not to the strokes you draw.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); the Chinese Character Simplification Scheme (1956); the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.

A way to remember it

The 问 you have just written, with one more bar inside the inner square: that turns it into 日 instead of 口. Count that bar, it is the whole difference between the two characters, and the square still touches nothing.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

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