The character 思 (sī): to ponder

A corner of a Chinese garden: a pale green pool with two round lotus pads, grey rocks along its rim, a grey brick wall with tiled coping, tall bamboo at the left. On a flat rock a terracotta orange figure sits cross legged in profile, one elbow on a knee and a hand near the chin. At the right, against wall and sky, the character 思 in near black: a square of four cells above a wider 心, a lying curve whose right end lifts into a hook.
Pronunciation
sī
Strokes
9
Radical
心
Made of
田心

What it means

to think; to consider

Where its shape comes from

The box on top is not the field. Xu Shen analyses the character as 心 plus 囟, and 囟 (xìn) is the fontanelle, the top of the skull, which is to say the head. The graph stacks head and heart, and that is the Chinese way of naming thought, shared between the two. Later regularisation wrote that 囟 as a 田, and the resemblance misleads: a field never had any business here.

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

A box with four compartments, exactly the shape of the 田 learned earlier, sitting on the 心 of entry twenty-two, which spreads wider than it. The two never touch, and the heart's three small marks stay clear of its curve.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

Share this page