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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
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.

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

Writing it

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

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