笑
Symbols Emotions
laughter
ㄒㄧㄠˋ xiào
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.
Laughing out loud — the same character Chinese uses for smiling, with no line drawn between them.
Before you commit
Choose with care笑 also means to laugh at someone. 嘲笑 is to mock and 見笑 is to be laughed at, so context does a lot of work here.
JapaneseShared kanji, read warau. Very widely recognised in Japan, so the single glyph will not read as distinctively Chinese.
At small sizes10 strokes with a bamboo radical on top. Clean and open; one of the safer small or curved placements.
Meaning
To laugh, to smile; laughter.
One character does the work of both English words.
Other characters for “laughter”
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