honor

Choose with careEnglish honour splits in two here. 義 is honour as duty and rightness; 榮 is honour as glory and praise. Decide which you mean before inking. 義 has a second life meaning adopted or artificial. The dictionary's own gloss for that sense is "false — having the name but not the reality, not by blood": 義父 an adoptive father, 義子 an adopted son, 義齒 a false tooth, 義肢 a prosthetic limb. That last one is not archaic — 義肢 is the term used in Taiwan's national health insurance regulations and on hospital department signs. Context usually settles which 義 is meant, but a Taiwanese reader meets both.

Japanese義 carries the sense of giri, social obligation. In Japan it reads as duty first.

At small sizes義 is thirteen strokes with a dense lower half. It needs room or the strokes merge.

Cultural noteThe sense most Chinese readers reach for first is 義氣 — standing by your friends at cost to yourself. It is a compliment in ordinary speech. It is also the word Taiwanese gang culture uses about itself: a Reporter investigation into how gangs recruit teenagers describes loyalty to the temple and 義氣 between brothers as the boy's passport into that world. Both readings are live at once.