thunder

雷

ㄌㄟˊ léi

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

Thunder: sudden overwhelming force, and in Chinese also the sound of authority coming down on somebody.

Before you commit

Choose with care雷 in modern internet slang also means shocking or cringeworthy. Younger readers may see that before they see the weather.

Pairs well with雷霆萬鈞 — the standard phrase for a force nothing can resist.

At small sizesThe rain radical on top is four dots inside a frame; below about 3 cm they merge into a bar.

Meaning

Thunder; also a mine or explosive charge.

Rain above a field: thirteen strokes and very solid on the page.

Other characters for “thunder”

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