While I was still at the Chinese department, during our lectures on Chinese writing, our professors taught us about 6 Chinese character types: pictograms (象形字), simple indicatives (指事字), semantic compounds (會意字), phono-semantic compounds (形聲字), phonetic loans (假借字) and derived characters (轉注字). (For further reading on Chinese character types see this post).
While they explained the first 5 quite in detail, when talking about the last sixth category, we were told that these still require further research and that no one really understands them well. Or so they said.
望 wang4 'hope, expect' is a derived character. Let's look at its definition from the 說文解字 (100 CE) dictionary first:
