surplus

餘

ㄩˊ yú

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

What is left over after enough. In Chinese this is a lucky idea, because leftovers at new year mean the year provided more than you needed.

Before you commit

Choose with care餘 is a genuinely lucky character, but it is also plain arithmetic - a remainder in a division sum. On its own it can read as a bookkeeping term rather than a blessing.

Cultural noteFish is eaten at new year because 魚 sounds exactly like 餘. The wish 年年有餘 means may each year leave something over, and every Chinese reader knows it.

At small sizesFifteen strokes with the food radical on the left. The right side is a tight stack that fills in below roughly three centimetres.

Meaning

Surplus, remainder; what is left over, spare, in excess.

The character in 年年有餘, may every year have surplus.

Other characters for “surplus”

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