wolf

狼

ㄌㄤˊ láng

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

The wolf — which in Chinese is a predator to be wary of, not a noble loner.

Before you commit

Choose with care狼 leans heavily negative in Chinese: 狼心狗肺 for a cruel person, 色狼 for a lecher, 狼狽 for both a shambles and colluding with someone. Modern usage is not uniform, though — 狼性 is used admiringly of drive and persistence in business writing as often as it is used as an accusation. What does not carry over is the lone wolf: that is 獨狼 or 獨行俠 in Chinese, and 獨狼 now reads first as a lone-wolf terrorist attack.

At small sizes10 strokes, narrow and upright. It scales down cleanly, which is more than the meaning does.

Cultural noteMongolian and steppe culture does honour the wolf, and Chinese writing about the north reflects that. But in ordinary Chinese usage the negative reading dominates.

Meaning

Wolf.

The plain character, with the dog radical on the left.

Other characters for “wolf”

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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