兆
Symbols Spirit
omen
ㄓㄠˋ zhào
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 sign that something is coming. The Chinese character says nothing about whether the news is good, and in modern use it mostly reads as a number.
Before you commit
Choose with careIn modern Chinese 兆 is mostly arithmetic. It means a trillion, and it is the mega- of 兆赫, megahertz. Readers meet the number long before the portent.
At small sizesSix strokes in two mirrored halves with a channel down the middle. Keep that channel - closed up, the character stops reading.
Cultural noteOmens were read from cracks in heated bone and shell, and those inscriptions are the oldest surviving Chinese writing. This vocabulary is genuinely ancient.
Meaning
An omen, a portent, a sign. Also a trillion, and mega- in technical use.
The classical word for a portent, good or bad without saying which.
Other characters for “omen”
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