氣
Symbols Spirit
life force
ㄑㄧˋ qì
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.
What makes a living thing alive. Chinese gives it the same character as breath and air, which is more or less the whole idea.
Before you commit
Choose with careThis is the same character as our qi page - Chinese does not distinguish the two. 氣 also carries the everyday senses of air and of anger.
Cultural noteIn Chinese medicine 精, 氣 and 神 are the three treasures - essence, energy and spirit. Life-force is the middle one of the three.
At small sizesTen strokes with a busy enclosed interior. Fine at medium size; small it turns into a filled block.
Meaning
Vital energy; breath, air; the force that animates.
The plain Chinese answer to what life-force means - the same word as qi.
Other characters for “life force”
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.
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