社 shè is a meaning compound: the altar-and-spirit radical 礻 (the squeezed form of 示, the sacrificial altar) stands beside 土 tǔ, earth. The picture is an altar raised to the god of the soil. The 礻 marks the character as something sacred and ritual, while 土 names exactly which spirit is being honoured, the power of the ground itself. The simplified and traditional forms are identical, seven strokes that have stayed stable through the script's history.

In the oldest sense 社 is that soil-god and the shrine where it was served. Every settlement had its own altar of the soil, and the people of a place were bound together by the worship they shared there. From that root, the word's whole modern reach unfolds, because a 社 was never just a god but the community gathered around it.

Three faces grow from this core of a people gathered around a shared altar:

1. Society, community. The human collective considered as a whole or as a local circle: 社会 shèhuì (society), 社区 shèqū (community, neighbourhood), 社交 shèjiāo (social interaction).
2. An association, an organization, an agency. A formally gathered body of people: 社团 shètuán (a club or society), 报社 bàoshè (a newspaper office), 通讯社 tōngxùnshè (a news agency), 旅行社 lǚxíngshè (a travel agency), 出版社 chūbǎnshè (a publishing house).
3. The god of the soil, the shrine. The original ritual sense, surviving chiefly in 社稷 shèjì, the altars of soil and grain that once stood for the whole state, and in the village 土地 land-and-soil cult.

The thread is the gathering. Honour a soil-god and a community forms around its altar; widen that community and you have society; formalise a slice of it for a shared purpose and you have an association; and behind it all stands the old shrine where the binding first took place.

The broadest face of 社 is the human collective itself. 社会 shèhuì is society at its widest: the whole web of people and institutions in which a life is lived. Narrow the lens to where people actually live side by side and you reach 社区 shèqū, the local community or neighbourhood. Turn from the structure to the act of mixing within it and you get 社交 shèjiāo, the business of meeting and dealing with other people. The three move from the vast to the near to the personal, but all rest on the same idea of people bound together.

Formalise a circle of people around a shared purpose and 社 names the resulting body. On its own, 社团 shètuán is the general word for a club or society, the kind students join on campus. More productively, 社 sits at the tail of a long line of compounds naming a particular kind of organization or agency: a 报社 is a newspaper office, a 通讯社 a news agency, a 旅行社 a travel agency, an 出版社 a publishing house. In each, a domain word sets the field and 社 supplies the institution.

Beneath the modern senses lies the oldest one, the soil-god and its altar. The key survival is 社稷 shèjì, a pairing of 社, the spirit of the soil, with 稷 jì, the spirit of grain. Together the soil and the grain were the two altars a ruler kept, and because no state could stand without land to hold it and harvest to feed it, 社稷 came to mean the state or the realm itself. The village-level cult survives too in 土地, the local land-and-soil deity honoured at small shrines. These uses are formal or literary now, but they are the root from which everything else in this character grew.

Hold one picture at the center of 社: an altar (礻) raised on the earth (土), a shrine to the god of the soil with the village gathered around it. Everything in the character is that gathering, widened or formalised.

Let the circle around the altar grow until it takes in everyone, and you have 社会 society and the smaller 社区 community, with 社交 the act of mixing within them. Carve out a piece of that circle for a single purpose and you get the organization: the 社团 club, and the long line of agencies whose name ends in 社, the 报社 newspaper office, the 旅行社 travel agency, the 出版社 publishing house. Then walk back to the altar itself and you reach the oldest sense, the 社稷 soil-and-grain altars that stood for the whole state, shrunk in the villages to the humble 土地 earth-god by the field. Whenever you meet 社, look for the gathering: who is bound together here, and around what shared ground.