awakening

醒

ㄒㄧㄥˇ xǐng

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

Coming to - from sleep, from illusion, or from a way of living you no longer accept.

Before you commit

Choose with care醒 also means to sober up, and the wine radical on the left is visible to any reader. That association is not always the one you want.

Pairs well with覺醒 for the figurative awakening, or 清醒 for being clear-headed and lucid. Both are less literal than 醒 alone.

At small sizesSixteen strokes with the wine radical crowding the left. Small versions lose that side first, which distorts the reading.

Meaning

To wake up; to sober up; to come to one's senses.

It covers waking from sleep and waking up to the truth in the same word.

Other characters for “awakening”

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