衡
Symbols Life
balance
ㄏㄥˊ héng
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
Same in both
Layout
Rubbing mode: white on black, as a stone rubbing. The download is unaffected.
Two things held in equilibrium; the technical word and the philosophical one are not the same.
Before you commit
Choose with careA lone 衡 reads as to weigh or to measure, and it is a common element in personal names. For balance as a state, 平衡 is the word.
At small sizesSixteen strokes across three columns. Wide and busy, so it needs horizontal room rather than height.
Cultural note平衡 covers more than physics: a budget, an ecosystem, and 工作與生活的平衡, which is the ordinary Chinese phrase for work-life balance. 中庸 is the philosophical word, though plenty of readers now hear 平庸, mediocre, in it. Negated, 心理不平衡 means resentful rather than unsteady.
Meaning
To weigh; a balance beam; to consider one thing against another.
The character inside 平衡, and it means the act of weighing.
Other characters for “balance”
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.
Read more
This character is one of the ten in a longer piece on what a character carries beyond its dictionary meaning.
Related concepts