Amazing Chinese Characters (240) Beautiful - 美

The shell bone script for Beautiful is

which is a person normally a young girl who wears a garland and other decorations on her body, which looks very beautiful.

The big seal script for the character is

Similar to the shell bone script, but two long whip on the head.

The small seal script is

The top becomes 羊 （Sheep).  Some experts believe that it is mistake to wrongly replace the garland with the Sheep, because it looks like garland. Other experts believe that people put sheep horns as decoration on the head for better looking.

The clerical script for the character is

Top is Sheep or Goat, bottom is Big. Big Goat is Beautiful? It is delicious. In Chinese, Delicious = Beautiful taste.

The character pronunciation (Pinyin) is Mei3.

I want to point out, U.S.A. in Chinese is 美国, which means Beautiful Country.