Small dots for husked grains, gathered around a dividing line where farmers heaped and sorted the harvest: that is 米. The shape has barely drifted in three thousand years — the four grains around a cross sit on your phone's keyboard almost exactly as they sat on the oracle bones. Rice fed the wet, paddy-field south of China the way wheat and millet fed the drier north, and this one small drawing grew to mean grain in general, and then simply "uncooked rice".
A piece of culture
No rice, no meal Chinese has an old proverb: 巧妇难为无米之炊 — "even a clever cook cannot make a meal without rice." It is still used today for anyone asked to produce results without the resources to do it. Rice mattered so much that in much of China, the everyday way to ask "how are you?" is 你吃饭了吗 — literally "have you eaten rice yet?"
Use it in a real word
大米
dàmǐ · daai6 mai5
rice — the everyday word for the grain you cook; you already know 大