The character 想 (xiǎng): to think

A late afternoon landscape: a grassy summit in the foreground, terraced rice fields dropping away to a village of grey houses with dark roofs, blue grey mountains beyond and a golden sky. At the left an orange figure stands still in profile, arms at the sides, looking toward the distant village. At the right the character 想 in near black: 相 above, a narrow 木 beside an upright frame of three cells, and below it a 心 spread as wide as the whole upper tier without touching it.
Pronunciation
xiǎng
Strokes
13
Level
HSK1
Radical
心
Made of
相心

What it means

to think (about); to think of; to devise; to think (that); to believe (that); to desire; to want (to); to miss (feel wistful about the absence of)

Where its shape comes from

Xu Shen notes it as 心, with 相 for the sound: the heart carries the meaning, 相 supplies the reading, the two words being xiāng and xiǎng, one tone apart. This is the device behind the great majority of Chinese characters, the one at work in 花: one element for the meaning, one element for the sound. The tree and the eye inside 相 therefore say nothing about thinking; they are there for the way they sound.

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

The 相 you have just written, sitting on the 心 of entry twenty-two, which spreads as wide as the whole storey above it. Three characters you already know inside a single one: 木, 目, 心. Know all three and the strokes count themselves.

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

Words it appears in

See the 24 HSK words built on 想, grouped by level.

Writing it

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

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