flexibility

柔

ㄖㄡˊ róu

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

Yielding without breaking — in the body, in a rule, or in a plan.

Before you commit

Choose with care柔 alone can read as gentle or even soft in the sense of weak, especially applied to a person. 韌 carries the strength that English flexibility usually implies.

At small sizes柔 is nine strokes with an open lower half and stays legible when reduced, though the top hook can thicken into a blob in heavy brush styles.

Cultural note柔弱勝剛強 — the soft overcomes the hard — is the classical line behind this character, and it is also the 柔 of 柔道, judo.

Meaning

Soft, supple, yielding rather than rigid.

The Daoist virtue of the soft outlasting the hard; not weakness but strategy.

Other characters for “flexibility”

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