fog

霧

ㄨˋ wù

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

Fog: thick enough to hide what is inside it, and in Chinese the standard image for confusion and not seeing clearly.

Before you commit

Choose with care如墮五里霧中 — as if fallen into a five-mile fog — means being completely lost. Fog in Chinese is mostly about failing to see clearly.

At small sizesNineteen strokes under a rain radical. It needs to be large or the lower half turns solid.

Cultural note霾 is the smog half of 霧霾, the word mainland China has used for urban air pollution since about 2013, so that character now reads as pollution rather than weather. 霧 on its own is still ordinary fog, and in Taiwan the everyday word for bad air is 空污.

Meaning

Fog; heavy mist.

The ordinary word, and the one every Chinese reader uses without thinking.

Other characters for “fog”

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