birthday

壽

ㄕㄡˋ shòu

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

The yearly return of the day you were born. Chinese uses one word for ordinary birthdays and a grander one for an elder's milestone.

Before you commit

Choose with care壽 is used on funerary goods as well as at birthdays - 壽衣 are burial clothes and 壽材 is a coffin, both named euphemistically for long life. The association is real and worth knowing.

Cultural noteThe birthdays done formally are an elder's round-number ones, usually from sixty on, with long-life noodles and peach-shaped 壽桃 buns. Younger people's birthdays are ordinary by comparison.

At small sizesFourteen strokes in stacked horizontal bands. Dense and easily muddied small; the stylised round 壽 seen on ceramics is a design, not the standard form.

Meaning

Long life; also a birthday celebrated for an older person.

The character on a birthday banquet for a grandparent.

Other characters for “birthday”

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.

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