The character 动 (dòng): to move

A festive Chinese street: grey brick houses with dark tiled roofs on both sides, strings of red lanterns, pale paving running toward the far end. A huge lion dance head in red and gold with a cream mane fills the left, its cloth body streaming behind it, while two flat orange dancers leap beneath with their arms raised. A red and gold drum and a pair of gold cymbals with a red ribbon rest on the ground. At the right, large on the paving, the character 动 in bold black.
Pronunciation
dòng
Strokes
6
Level
HSK2
Radical
力
Made of
云力

What it means

(of sth) to move; to set in movement; to displace; to touch; to make use of; to stir (emotions); to alter; abbr. for 動詞|动词[dong4 ci2], verb

Where its shape comes from

The long form is 動, which Xu Shen takes apart as "from 力, with 重 for the pronunciation": strength carries the meaning, heavy carries the sound. It is the device behind 花 and 想, one element for the sense and one for the reading. The 1956 simplification put in place of 重 two strokes shaped like the cloud, and those two strokes say nothing whatever: not the meaning, not the pronunciation. They shorten the writing, and that is all they do.

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 動, the traditional character: 动 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

On the right, the 力 of the third row: its slanting stroke starts ABOVE the top bar and cuts through it, just as it does in 加 and in 男. On the left, the shape of 云: a short bar, a longer bar, then the curve and its dot.

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

Words it appears in

See the 79 HSK words built on 动, grouped by level.

Writing it

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

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