盾
Symbols Protection
shield
ㄉㄨㄣˋ dùn
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 thing you hold up against a blow. In Chinese it is a concrete object, and it comes with one very famous association.
Before you commit
Choose with care矛盾 - spear and shield - is the ordinary Chinese word for contradiction, from the story of a man selling an unstoppable spear and an impenetrable shield. Readers see 盾 and think contradiction.
At small sizesNine strokes under a sloping top. It scales down well, but keep the enclosed box at the base open or it fills in.
Cultural note盾 also names foreign currencies in Chinese - the Vietnamese dong and the old Dutch guilder are both 盾. It appears in exchange tables more often than in anything heroic.
Meaning
A shield.
The plain object. Chinese does not use it figuratively for a protector.
Other characters for “shield”
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