岔
Symbols Life
crossroads
路
ㄔㄚˋ ㄌㄨˋ chà lù
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.
The point where roads divide and you have to pick one. Chinese names this with a two-character word rather than a single character.
Before you commit
Choose with careThere is no single character a Chinese reader would recognise as crossroads on its own, so a two-character word is the honest option here.
At small sizesTwenty-one strokes over two characters. Stack or space them; side by side at small scale they merge into a dark band.
Cultural note歧路 is a fork in the road, but the dictionary gives it a second sense — a wrong or crooked path, as in 誤入歧路. The old story behind 歧路亡羊 is a sheep lost where the road kept dividing, and what it laments is a searcher losing his way among too many branches. 岔路 is the plain neutral word and the two are not interchangeable.
Meaning
A fork in the road; a branching path.
The everyday word for the physical fork and for a turning point in a life.
Other characters for “crossroads”
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