Amazing Chinese Characters（559) Village - 屯

 The shell bone script of character village is

A seed is seedling, the top is the sprout, the bottom is the new root. The original meaning of the character is seedling. 

The bronze script of the character is

The sprout on the top with a black dot, which is an indicator to show the emphasizing area: the top of sprout (not the root, not the side sprout), the most exuberant one. 

The big seal script of the character is

Very similar to bronze script.

The small seal script of the character is

Similar to bronze and big seal scripts except the horizontal line on the top, which is from the dot of the bronze or big seal script because there is no dot in small seal script, all dots are lines, vertical or horizontal.

The clerical script of the character is

Similar to small seal script.

The pinyin of the character is Tun2.

The meaning of the character changed to village, maybe due to the fact that the seedling is only popular in village.

There is another character Village - 乡（鄉）,  which is much bigger area of countryside, may include many villages, also is the standard term for village used nationwide. The character 屯 is only used in some area of northern China, not used in southern China.