物 wù is a pictophonetic compound: 牛 (niú, ox) carries the meaning, 勿 (wù) the sound. The left side is the ox radical, narrowed from its full form, signaling that the word began in the world of cattle. The right side 勿 supplies the reading and survives in the modern pronunciation. The Shuōwén reads 物 as the varicolored ox, the mottled or mixed-color beast, and from that concrete starting point the meaning widened until it covered everything that exists.

How did "spotted cattle" become "the myriad things"? Color and kind were how the ancients sorted their herds, and to name the varieties of a thing is one short step from naming things in general. By the classical period 物 had let go of the ox almost entirely and meant any thing, object, or creature at all.

Three senses branch from that widening:

1. Thing, object, the concrete article. Anything you can point to or hold: 东西 dōngxi (thing), 物品 wùpǐn (goods, articles), 物体 wùtǐ (a physical body), 礼物 lǐwù (gift), 食物 shíwù (food).
2. Matter, substance, the stuff of the world. The technical sense in science: 物质 wùzhì (matter), 生物 shēngwù (living things, biology), 动物 dòngwù (animal), 植物 zhíwù (plant).
3. The wider field of things and beings. Existence taken as a whole, including people seen as figures: 万物 wànwù (all things), 人物 rénwù (a figure, a character), 物价 wùjià (the prices of goods).

The thread is the leap from one ox to all that is. 物 is the most general word the language has for "a thing," the bare noun that stands behind every object, every substance, and every creature in the world.

When Chinese built its modern vocabulary for science, 物 became the natural root for "matter" and for the living kinds. 物质 wùzhì pairs 物 (thing) with 质 zhì (substance, essence) to name matter itself, the stuff of physics and chemistry, and by extension the material side of life as opposed to the spiritual: 物质生活 "material life," 物质文明 "material civilization."

The same 物 sorts the living world into its two great branches. 动物 dòngwù, the "moving things," are the animals; 植物 zhíwù, the "planted things," are the plants; and 生物 shēngwù, the "living things," is the whole field of biology that studies them both. Here 物 has shed every last trace of the ox and works as a pure classifier of kinds, the slot that says "this is a category of thing in the world."

Pushed to its limit, 物 names not just one thing but the totality of things. 万物 wànwù, the "ten thousand things," is the classical phrase for all of existence, the whole teeming world of creatures and objects that the Dao gives rise to. It is one of the grandest words 物 enters, the sense in which the bare noun for "thing" becomes a name for everything that is.

At the human end of the scale, 物 also frames a person as a figure. 人物 rénwù, literally "person-thing," means a notable individual or a character in a story, someone who counts as a "somebody." The same widening that turned one ox into all things also lets a person be spoken of as a thing of note, a figure on the stage of events.

Start with the ox, 牛, on the left of the character: one spotted, varicolored beast standing in a field. That single animal is where 物 began, the mottled ox of the Shuōwén. Now let the herd multiply and the kinds spread until the field is full of every creature and object imaginable. The one ox has become all things.

That widening is the whole word. Point at a single article and it is 物品 or 东西. Name its stuff and it is 物质. Sort it into the living kinds and it is 动物, 植物, 生物. Sweep your arm across the entire world and it is 万物, the myriad things. Whenever you meet 物, remember the one ox that grew into everything.