On the Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, August 8th. The Chinese character "? might made great impress to the world. This is almost the most popular character to the native but a little complicated to explain in simple words to a foreigner. The Chinese character "?, has 5 kinds of pronunciation and over 16 different meanings. The pronucation alters as hé, hè ,hú ,huó, huò while the meaning of it changes in great difference.                             

The most popular pronuciation of the character is hé.  And it can reflect 10 kinds of meanings when arranged in phrases or sentences as below:
1. peaceful, harmonious
2. quietude,calmness, equability
3. appease, clam down, cool down,quench,quiet down, subside, suppress
4. adding, addition, plus, tote
5. related
6. together with
7. to (prep.)
8. Yamato, folk of Japanese
9. a competition result in dogfall
10. chinese surname

The second kind of pronucation for character "?,  hè. It has 2 explainations:
1. harmonic (music)
2. compose poem with imitating someone else's  subject matter or literature type

The third pronouncation is huó and the only meaning is: mill or mix round dope like jelly

When the character pronounced huò, it  has 2 meanings.
1. mix different kinds of powder and churn up with water
2. times (quantifier)

The last pronouncation is hú. And the character is appear as a single word means winning in a mah-jong or card game.

Composed by Yoan