Chinese character "is" "是"(is) is another one of the most frequently used characters in Chinese. It is made up of three blocks, "日"(sun), "又"(hand) and "止"(toe). Originally it means the exact day to go out on your foot and use your hands to plant crops. So it has the meaning of something correct (derived from "correct time"). "日" is a circle with a central dot. It's a circle because the sun is round. The dot is indicative, referring to the fact that the sun is shining. "又" meant "hand", actually, it's the right hand. Hand? Yes! Doesn't it resemble the hand, does it? But this meaning was lost already. I didn't get it about how did the current meaning come from. But after I found out that "又" was used in the ancient numbering system, it became clearer. It was a symbol placed between the tens digit and the unit digit. For example, "俘人十又六人(We had sixteen captives. It's an Oracle bone script in the Shang Dynasty)". It's quite natural people doing that. Because your hands are the most convenient tool for counting. I guess we will use octal number system if we were the octopus. So "又" got another meaning -- more, in addition. In the beginning, "止" meant "toe" and looked like three toes. But why it then became "stop"? Somebody says that you must have stopped marching if there is only one footprint on the ground. Well, I don't have a better explanation for this.