secret

祕

ㄇㄧˋ mì

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

Something deliberately kept from others. Taiwan writes the main character with the altar radical, which is worth getting right.

Before you commit

Choose with care祕 and 密 are both bound characters that live inside compounds. Alone, 祕 reads as a fragment to most people and 密 reads as dense before it reads as secret.

Pairs well with祕密 for a secret, 隱密 for something kept out of sight. Either resolves the ambiguity a single character leaves.

At small sizesAround ten strokes, split left and right, the right half small and hooked. That hook is the first thing lost when it is inked small.

Meaning

Secret, hidden, esoteric.

The Taiwan standard form. Elsewhere the same word is often written 秘.

Other characters for “secret”

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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