dog

犬

ㄑㄩㄢˇ quǎn

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 dog: loyal in life and a byword for lowness in the language, depending on which character you pick.

Before you commit

Choose with care狗 runs through a long list of insults — 走狗 for a lackey, 狗腿子 for a henchman. 犬 is the more formal half and avoids those, though it has its own self-deprecating uses: 犬子 is how you humbly refer to your own son, and 犬馬之勞 is offering yourself as someone's animal.

Japanese犬 is the standard everyday word for dog in Japanese, read inu. Worth knowing before you commit: in Japanese it also carries two derogatory senses — an informer or snitch, and a loser. Chinese keeps 犬 in ordinary compounds like 導盲犬 and 警犬, so it is not a dead character here.

At small sizes4 strokes, and the dot at the upper right is what separates it from 大, meaning big. Make sure your artist keeps it distinct.

Meaning

Dog; the dignified, literary character.

Used in compounds like 忠犬 and 警犬; free of the insults.

Other characters for “dog”

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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