misleading image the character only has five strokes not eight and is indexed that way in dictionaries the middle vertical stroke is performed with one motion the leading dot occurs by the landing of the brush on the medium and the final tick is performed by flicking up and to the left it's misleading to explain this as three separate overlapping strokes without additional explanation similarly the left stroke is just one motion also a stroke isn't a necessarily a straight line it is a congtiguous motion performed without lifting the pen or brush