猴
Symbols Animals
monkey
ㄏㄡˊ hóu
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.
The monkey: quick, clever and impossible to keep still — admired for wits rather than for dignity.
Before you commit
Choose with care猴 means playful and quick-witted in Mandarin, and fidgety with it. In Taiwanese Hokkien it is stronger: 猴 kâu used of a person is an insult meaning thin, dark and unattractive, and it is the everyday word for mocking someone. 猴急 means agitated, not amusing.
At small sizes12 strokes with the dog radical left and a crowded right side. It closes up below a moderate size.
Cultural noteSun Wukong, the Monkey King of Journey to the West, is the most famous monkey in Chinese culture, but he is named 悟空 or 齊天大聖, not 猴. A lone 猴 reads as the zodiac animal first.
Meaning
Monkey.
The everyday character and the zodiac animal.
Other characters for “monkey”
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