矛
Symbols Protection
spear
ㄇㄠˊ máo
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 thrusting shaft weapon. The oldest character for it survives mainly inside the word for contradiction, which every Chinese speaker knows.
Before you commit
Choose with care矛 almost never stands alone in modern Chinese. A reader will supply 矛盾, contradiction, before they picture a weapon.
At small sizesFive strokes with a long hooked vertical. Clean and open small, and the single sweeping stroke suits a curved placement.
Cultural noteThat word comes from an old story about a man selling a spear that pierces anything and a shield nothing can pierce. Spear and shield became the word for a contradiction.
Meaning
A spear or lance, the ancient long-shafted kind.
Rarely used alone today, but instantly recognised from 矛盾.
Other characters for “spear”
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