merit

功

ㄍㄨㄥ gōng

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

Good done that counts in your favour. In the religious sense Chinese calls it 功德 and imagines it as a running balance.

Before you commit

Choose with careIn daily use 功 means achievement or credit - 成功 success, 立功 to distinguish yourself, 功課 homework. The religious sense of merit only appears with 德 attached.

Pairs well with功德 for the Buddhist sense, 功勞 for credit earned at work. The two are not interchangeable.

At small sizesFive strokes, plain and open. About as safe as a character gets at small size or on a curve.

Meaning

Merit, achievement, meritorious effort; work that earned something.

The single character, though it reads as achievement before it reads as merit.

Other characters for “merit”

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