The character 天 (tiān): sky

The Temple of Heaven in Beijing under a wide blue sky full of white clouds: the round hall with its three tiers of deep blue tiled roof and gold finial, its red walls, its white marble terraces and balustraded stairways, cypresses to either side. High in the sky, well above the roof, the character 天 in very dark brown: a short bar on top, a longer bar below it, joined by a short vertical, and two strokes falling from that vertical, one to the left and one to the right.
Pronunciation
tiān
Strokes
4
Level
HSK1
Radical
大
Made of
一大

What it means

day; sky; heaven

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen glosses it first as "the top of the head", then as "that above which there is nothing", and analyses it as a stroke laid on top of 大. The forms cut into bone point the same way and show it better still: a person standing and facing you, as in 大, whose head is drawn large, and it is that head which becomes the top bar. The sense of sky follows from what stands above, not from any drawing of a sky.

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

Take 大, learned earlier, and lay a short bar over the top of it. Nothing rises above that bar here: the top of the character is a clean straight line. If the end of a stroke pushes through it, what you have written is 夫 (fū), husband.

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

Words it appears in

See the 52 HSK words built on 天, grouped by level.

Writing it

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

Share this page