姓
Symbols Relationships
family name
ㄒㄧㄥˋ xìng
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.
The surname. In Chinese it comes first, it is usually a single character, and it is the part of a name a whole family shares.
Before you commit
Choose with care姓 means the concept surname, not your surname. If you want your own family name, the character to wear is that name itself.
Cultural noteChinese surnames are one character in the great majority of cases, and they are written before the given name. Two-character surnames like 歐陽 and 司馬 exist but are rare, so one well-chosen character is a whole surname.
At small sizesEight strokes, balanced left and right. Clean when reduced and forgiving on a curve.
Meaning
Surname, family name; the shared name of a lineage.
The plain word for it; note that it is written with the woman radical on the left.
Other characters for “family name”
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