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The character 休 (xiū): to rest

Chinese farmland in golden afternoon light: green paddy fields, a winding dirt path, blue hills and a grey tiled farmhouse at the right. Under a broad tree at the left, a flat orange figure sits in profile in the grass, knees drawn up and arms around them, a straw hat beside it. In the middle of the meadow the character 休 rises very large in deep brown, a slanted stroke on a tall upright, then a bar crossed by a stem with two long strokes spreading down.
Pronunciation
xiū
Strokes
6
Radical
人
Made of
亻木

What it means

to rest; to stop doing sth for a period of time; to cease; (imperative) don't

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen needs a single line for this one: "to rest, to stop; from a person leaning against a tree." The graph brings no distant ideas together. It simply sets side by side the two things that sentence names, and the oracle bones already write it in exactly that way. Among the characters of this course it is one of the few whose reading palaeographers do not argue about.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.

A way to remember it

Two characters you have already met, shoulder to shoulder: 人, the person of the first row, standing tight against the left edge, and 木, the tree, whole on the right. Watch the 木 here: it keeps its broad sweep down to the right. It is on the LEFT, in 林 or in 相, that it shrinks to a dot.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

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