shelter

庇

ㄅㄧˋ bì

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

Cover from what would otherwise hit you. Chinese pictures this as shade rather than as walls.

Before you commit

Choose with care庇 rarely appears alone and carries a faint sense of shielding someone from consequences - 包庇 means to cover up for a wrongdoer. 庇護 is cleaner.

Cultural note祖蔭, the shade of the ancestors, means the protection and advantage handed down by earlier generations. 蔭 carries that warmth in a way 庇 does not.

At small sizesSeven strokes under a shed radical, open on two sides. Legible small, though the open corner can look unfinished at a distance.

Where the sense comes fromThe character is literally tree shade, and that is where the protection sense comes from: what an ancestor casts over descendants is the same word as what a tree casts over the ground. Taiwan reads 蔭 yìn for both senses. The mainland splits them — 树荫 (tree shade) is yīn, while 庇荫 and 荫庇, the protection meant here, are yìn on both sides.

Meaning

To shelter, to shield, to give protection to someone.

The protection a roof or a powerful person extends over another.

Other characters for “shelter”

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