memory

憶

ㄧˋ yì

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

Layout

What the mind keeps. Chinese separates the act of recalling from the record that is deliberately kept.

Before you commit

Choose with care憶 is a verb. Both senses the dictionaries give it — to think of, and to remember — are verbs; neither is the noun memory. The three examples the Ministry of Education's own dictionary offers are all two-character words: 回憶, 追憶, 記憶. Alone, 憶 reads as an act in progress rather than a thing you hold.

JapaneseJapanese has no native reading for 憶 at all — only the on'yomi oku, and only inside compounds like 憶測 and 追憶. Japanese writes a memory as 思い出, which does not use this character. So 憶 alone is a fragment in Japanese too, and more clearly so than in Chinese.

Pairs well with回憶 for memories you look back on, 記憶 for memory as a faculty, 追憶 for the literary sense of remembering someone gone.

At small sizesSixteen strokes with a crowded right side. Needs decent size; below a few centimetres the interior lines close up.

Meaning

To recall, to remember; to bring something back to mind.

The remembering character, heart radical and all - 回憶, 記憶.

Other characters for “memory”

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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