家
Symbols Relationships
family
ㄐㄧㄚ jiā
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 people you belong to. Chinese uses one character for the household, the building, and the family living inside it.
Before you commit
Choose with care家 covers the building and the people in it equally, so it reads as belonging rather than bloodline. It is written 宀 over 豕 — a roof over a pig — and while that is traditionally explained as a household with its livestock, 說文 has the lower part carrying the sound, not the sense.
JapaneseJapanese uses the same glyph, read ie or ka, with the same house-and-family sense, so it will not read as distinctly Chinese.
At small sizesTen strokes under a roof radical. The lower half is a crossed tangle that closes up when small — give it room.
Meaning
Home, household, family; also a school of thought.
Family and house in one word — Chinese does not separate the two.
Other characters for “family”
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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