The character 人 (rén): person

A paved Chinese lane runs between grey brick walls with dark tiled roofs and hanging red lanterns, under a golden sky. On the left, a flat terracotta orange silhouette of a man walks in profile across the flagstones, one leg forward and one behind. On the right, on the same paving and at the same height, the character 人 in very dark brown: one stroke falls from the top then curves down to the left, and a second leaves its side, a quarter lower, and runs down to the right.
Pronunciation
rén
Strokes
2
Level
HSK1
Radical
人

What it means

person; people; CL:個|个[ge4],位[wei4]

Where its shape comes from

The oldest forms draw a single human being seen from the SIDE, standing upright, with one arm and one leg showing. Nothing is combined here: the graph simply pictures what it names, which makes it a pictogram. The reading one often meets, of two people leaning on one another, has no support anywhere in the early inscriptions, since only one figure was ever drawn.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE), which glosses it as "depicting the shape of the arms and the legs"; 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

Read the two strokes as a pair of legs seen from the side: the left one stays behind while the right one swings forward. What you are looking at is a walking step, and there is nothing else to draw here, least of all a head.

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

Words it appears in

See the 127 HSK words built on 人, grouped by level.

Writing it

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

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