里
Symbols Life
milestone
程
碑
ㄌㄧˇ ㄔㄥˊ ㄅㄟ lǐ chéng bēi
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.
A point that marks how far you have come. Chinese uses a three-character word meaning mile-marker stone, figuratively just as English does.
Before you commit
Choose with careThere is no one-character milestone. 里程碑 is the honest answer at three characters; anything shorter says marker or stage, not achievement.
Cultural noteDo not wear 碑 on its own. Alone it reads as a memorial stele or a gravestone, which is not the meaning anyone is after.
At small sizesThree characters and over thirty strokes together. Set them in a vertical column with space; side by side and small they merge into a band.
Meaning
Milestone; a marker stone on a road, and by extension a landmark achievement.
The real word, and it carries the same figurative sense as the English.
Other characters for “milestone”
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