sorrow

悲

ㄅㄟ bēi

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

Deep grief at a loss — heavier and more specific than sadness.

Before you commit

Choose with care悲 is not only grief. In 慈悲 it means compassion, the Buddhist sense of feeling another's suffering. That double reading may be a feature or a problem.

At small sizes悲 is twelve strokes in two tidy bands over a heart base and holds up reasonably when reduced, unlike most of the heavier grief characters.

Cultural note哀 belongs to funerals — 哀悼 is condolence, and white banners carry it. Chinese readers will connect it to a death, not to a mood.

Meaning

Sorrow, grief; deep sadness at loss.

The main character for grief, and also the compassion half of Buddhist 慈悲.

Other characters for “sorrow”

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