The character 男 (nán): man

Terraced rice paddies climb a Chinese hillside, their bright green strips divided by ochre earth banks, with a tiled farmhouse and a wooded mountain behind under a blue cloudy sky. At the left, standing on one bank and seen in profile, a flat orange farmer in a conical hat carries a hoe over the shoulder. Across the middle of the terraces the character 男 rises very large in deep brown: the four celled square of 田 above, and below it 力, whose slant runs far down to the left.
Pronunciation
nán
Strokes
7
Level
HSK1
Radical
田
Made of
田力

What it means

(bound form) male; baron, the lowest of the five ranks of nobility 五等爵位[wu3deng3 jue2wei4]

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen leaves no room for doubt: "from 田 and 力; which is to say that the man puts his strength to work in the fields." Both elements are there from the oracle bones onwards. And if one follows the reading palaeographers now give of 力, a ploughing implement rather than a sinew, then what the character sets down is quite literally the plough in the field.

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 above the other: 田, the field, on top, and 力 underneath. The slanting stroke of 力 rises above its own bar and runs a long way out to the left, under the field.

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

Words it appears in

See the 8 HSK words built on 男, grouped by level.

Writing it

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

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