和 living harmoniously

If you have caught the Olympics opening ceremony, you would have seen the Chinese characters formed by the moving blocks display. The word displayed was 和 which is pronounced as he2 (second tone).

This character is actually composed of two characters, on the left is 禾 which means grain, and on the right 口 which means mouth. Both characters taken all together forms the 和 character.

We can say that harmony 和 results when everybody has enough (禾 grain) to eat (口 mouth).

The pronunciations of 和 and 禾 is the same. This method of forming characters by borrowing the sound and distinguishing it by another character (the determinative, 口) is called phono-semantic compound characters.