劍
Symbols Protection
sword
ㄐㄧㄢˋ jiàn
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.
Chinese splits bladed weapons in two: the straight double-edged sword of the scholar-swordsman, and the curved single-edged blade of the soldier.
Before you commit
Choose with care劍 and 刀 are not interchangeable. Calling a katana a 劍 is wrong to a Chinese reader; that is a 刀, and the distinction is one everyone knows.
JapaneseJapanese writes this as the simplified-style 剣. The traditional 劍 will read as Chinese, or as deliberately archaic, to a Japanese eye.
At small sizesFifteen strokes, with a stack of short marks on the left. Give it room; below a few centimetres the left side closes up.
Meaning
A straight double-edged sword, carried and studied as much as fought with.
The weapon of the swordsman and the Taoist priest; the elegant one.
Other characters for “sword”
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.
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