生 Radical 100 — to be born, to live; to grow; raw, unprocessed
shēng (first tone, high and level)
to be born, to live; to grow; raw, unprocessed
Radical 1005 strokes1 characters
Where the shape comes from
A shoot 屮 pushing up through the line of the ground: the lowest horizontal is the soil and everything above it is the plant breaking out of it. From growing come being born and being alive, and from a thing not yet worked comes "raw" — 生菜 raw leaves for salad, 生词 a word still unfamiliar. The graph heads very few characters but is one of the most productive phonetics in the writing system: 姓, 性, 星, 牲 all take their sound from it.