別
Symbols Relationships
farewell
ㄅㄧㄝˊ bié
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.
Parting from someone. Chinese has a whole vocabulary of leaving, and the shortest character is also the most ambiguous.
Before you commit
Choose with care別 is used far more often as the word for do not, as in 別走, do not go. On its own it will read as a negative command to many people before it reads as parting.
At small sizesSeven strokes with a knife radical on the right. Simple and safe small, though the two vertical strokes need clear space.
Cultural noteBreaking a willow branch to give a departing traveller was the classical gesture of farewell, and the parting poem is a whole genre. 送別 carries that inheritance; 別 alone does not.
Meaning
To part; to leave; separation.
The character in 告別 and 送別, and the core of the idea.
Other characters for “farewell”
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