atonement

贖

罪

ㄕㄨˊ ㄗㄨㄟˋ shú zuì

Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.

Script

Characters

Layout

Making up for something you did wrong. Chinese frames this as paying off a debt, and has no single character carrying the whole idea.

Before you commit

Choose with care贖罪 names a 罪 - a crime or a sin. It states plainly that you did something wrong and are paying it off, which lands heavier in Chinese than atonement does in English.

Pairs well with改過 for correcting a fault, 補過 for repairing the damage. Both read as change rather than as debt.

At small sizesAround twenty-two strokes then thirteen - a heavy pair. Below a few centimetres both characters fill in.

Meaning

To atone; to make good a wrong by paying for it.

The exact term, in religious use and in ordinary speech alike.

Other characters for “atonement”

What to do next

Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.

Related concepts