Over 3,000 years ago, a scribe carved a circle with a dot inside onto an ox bone: the sun. Because one sunrise marks one day, 日 came to mean both "sun" and "day". The round shape slowly squared off, because carving circles into bone and bronze was hard work.
A piece of culture
The oracle bones The oldest Chinese writing we know was carved on turtle shells and ox bones around 1250 BCE. Kings asked the bones questions — about harvests, weather, war — then heated them until they cracked and read the answers in the cracks. Farmers kept digging these "dragon bones" up near Anyang for centuries before scholars realized, in 1899, that they were looking at the birth certificate of Chinese writing.
Use it in a real word
日本
Rìběn · jat6 bun2
Japan — literally "origin of the sun", the land where the sun rises