銀
Symbols Nature
galaxy
河
ㄧㄣˊ ㄏㄜˊ yín hé
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 Milky Way, named in Chinese as a river of silver across the sky.
Before you commit
Choose with care銀河 means our Milky Way. For galaxies in general an astronomer writes 星系, and the two are not interchangeable.
At small sizesFourteen strokes beside eight. The metal radical in the first character crowds, so avoid very small settings.
Cultural noteIn the legend the silver river keeps the cowherd and the weaver girl apart, and they cross it once a year on a bridge of magpies. That separation is the classical reading. In everyday modern use 銀河 and 星河 have gone romantic and wide open, which is how they turn up in lyrics and given names.
Meaning
The Milky Way, literally the silver river.
The common name, and the river in the weaver girl legend.
Other characters for “galaxy”
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