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The character 女 (nǚ): woman

A Chinese garden in golden light: a pale wall pierced by a round moon gate, banks of pink peonies, a weeping willow and a pavilion beyond. On the left, in profile, the flat coral red silhouette of a woman in a long robe, her hair gathered in a bun. On the right, the character 女 in very dark brown: a stroke going down to the left that breaks and turns to the lower right, a long diagonal crossing it to the lower left, and a long bar laid across both.
Pronunciation
nǚ
Strokes
3
Level
HSK 2
Radical
女

What it means

female; woman; daughter

Where its shape comes from

A person kneeling back on their heels, arms folded in front of them. This was the ordinary way of sitting at the time and not a posture of submission: other early characters show a figure kneeling in just the same way with no woman involved at all. Xu Shen keeps to "the woman; a figuring of the shape", and credits the analysis to Wang Yu. A pictogram, with nothing in dispute.

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

A way to remember it

Three strokes, and the first one turns: it runs down to the left, breaks sharply, and sets off again downwards to the right. That is ONE stroke, not two, and counting it twice is the commonest mistake made on this character. The long bar across the middle is written last.

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

Words it appears in

Writing it

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

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