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The character 星 (xīng): star

A twilight sky over hazy blue mountains, powder blue at the top and orange and gold toward the horizon; a small pavilion with an upswept roof stands in silhouette on a wooded crag at the lower left. High at the left a large golden four pointed star blazes among a dozen small ones. At the right the character 星 in near black: a rectangle cut by a single bar, and below it three bars of growing width crossed by a stem, with a short slanted stroke at the left.
Pronunciation
xīng
Strokes
9
Radical
日
Made of
日生

What it means

star; heavenly body; satellite; small amount

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen writes the long form 曐: three small boxes above, three stars, with 生 below for the sound. He adds at once that 星 is the abridged variant, the one that keeps a single box. The oldest inscriptions do carry several small circles, scattered without order: what the character shows is a sky, not one heavenly body. The box left on top is therefore not the sun, however exactly it has taken the sun's shape.

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

A way to remember it

The shape of 日 sitting on the shape of 生, two characters already learned. Count the bars at the bottom: THREE of them, each wider than the one above, as in 生; and a single bar inside the box on top, as in 日.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

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