祖
Symbols Relationships
grandmother
母
ㄗㄨˇ ㄇㄨˇ zǔ mǔ
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.
Chinese asks which one. The father's mother and the mother's mother have different names, and the wrong one is an obvious mistake.
Before you commit
Choose with careYou cannot avoid the choice. 祖母 and 奶奶 are the father's mother; 外婆 and 外祖母 are the mother's. There is no neutral word for grandmother.
Cultural noteThe 外 in 外婆 means outer, from a system that counted the mother's family as outside the lineage. Nobody means it unkindly, but the character is there.
At small sizesFifteen strokes over two characters, with 祖 dense on the left. Stack them vertically and keep them generous.
Meaning
Grandmother on the father's side; the formal written term.
What appears in writing and on documents for the paternal grandmother.
Other characters for “grandmother”
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