Calligraphy
Chinese Calligraphy Generator
Type a character and watch it take on the classic hands, from clean print to a loose, flying cursive. No Chinese keyboard? Type a word in any language and turn it into Chinese in one click. Good for picking a look before a tattoo, a card, or a piece of art.
Any language, up to ten characters, type English and hit "See it in Chinese", or enter a character like 爱 directly.
Looking for a name? A real Chinese name is chosen for sound and meaning, not spelled out letter by letter. Get your Chinese name first
These are digital calligraphy fonts, a fast way to compare styles before you settle on a look.
The five hands, and which one you are looking at
Chinese calligraphy is taught as five scripts, and they are usually listed in the order each became standard. That order contains a surprise: the wild, barely legible cursive hand is roughly two centuries older than the neat regular one that every schoolchild starts with. Speed did not arrive as a later corruption of tidiness. Scribes were already writing fast, and the tidy hand was the thing that had to be invented.
| Script | Pinyin | Became standard | How to recognize it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seal script | Standardized under the Qin, c. 220 BCE | Tall, symmetrical, every line the same thickness and mostly curved. It looks carved because it largely was. | |
| Clerical script | c. 200 BCE, the Han clerk's hand | Wide and flat rather than tall, with one dominant horizontal stroke that flares out into a heavy tail. | |
| Cursive script | c. 50 BCE | Whole characters collapse into two or three continuous strokes. Frequently unreadable without training, and meant to be. | |
| Running script | Han dynasty, matured in the fourth century | Regular script written at speed. Strokes lean into each other and occasionally join, but you can still read it. | |
| Regular script | c. 150 CE, dominant by the Tang | Every stroke separate, upright and deliberate. This is the hand schoolchildren learn and the one printing still imitates. |
What this generator covers, and what it does not
The six tiles above sit at the everyday end of that range. Print and Elegant are regular script, the hand of modern books. Brush, Running hand and Bold brush move through running script, progressively looser. Cursive is the real thing, and on many characters it will be genuinely hard to read.
- Cursive script · Cursive
- Running script · Running hand, Bold brush, Brush
- Regular script · Print, Elegant
Seal and clerical script are missing, and that is a limitation worth stating rather than hiding. Both need glyph sets drawn character by character from carved and brushed originals, and no free web font covers them at the quality this page would want. If you need a seal-script rendering, you need a calligrapher or a specialist font, not a generator.
The most famous piece of writing in China is a rough draft
In 353, an official named Wang Xizhi sat with forty-one friends, relatives and students beside a stream, floating cups of wine down the water and composing poems as a game. The preface he wrote for the resulting collection, the Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion, is the most admired piece of writing in the history of the art, and it was produced as an occasional piece at a party.
Emperor Taizong of the Tang wanted it so badly that he had it buried with him. Nothing in Wang Xizhi's own hand survives anywhere: every version you have ever seen is a tracing or a rubbing of a tracing. He is still called the Sage of Calligraphy, on the strength of copies of copies of an afternoon's improvisation.
That is worth holding onto while you compare fonts here. What Chinese calligraphy prizes is the record of a hand moving once, at speed, and never repeating itself. A digital face is the exact opposite: perfectly consistent, infinitely repeatable. It is a useful way to choose a look, and it is not the thing itself.
Coming soon, Artwork prints
The artwork generator: your word, as a real print
The styles above are quick digital fonts, good for comparing looks. The artwork generator is a different thing: your character, or your word, rendered as a piece worth framing, as a cinnabar seal or in black ink, in Chinese or in English. Below are four we've made; the version that turns anything you type into one is what we're building. Want to know when it opens?
We'll email you once when the artwork generator opens. No spam.
Questions people actually ask
What are the main styles of Chinese calligraphy?
Tradition counts five: seal script (zhuanshu), clerical (lishu), regular (kaishu), running (xingshu), and cursive (caoshu). They are ordered by when each became standard, not by how fast they are written. Regular script came last, around the Han-to-Tang transition, and is the one modern print still follows. This generator covers the everyday end of that range, from print through running hand to full cursive.
Is this real calligraphy?
No, and it is worth being clear about it. These are digital typefaces drawn after calligraphic hands, so every instance of a character comes out identical. Real calligraphy is brush, ink, pressure and timing, and no two characters by the same hand are ever the same. Use this to compare a look before you commit to one; it will not replace a calligrapher.
Can I use this to pick a style for a tattoo?
For choosing the look, yes. But style is the smaller half of the problem: most Chinese tattoo mistakes are the wrong character, not the wrong script. Settle the meaning first, reading the entry for the character you have in mind, and only then decide whether you want it in a clean regular hand or a loose cursive one.
Why does my English name look wrong when converted?
Because a Chinese name is not a spelling of an English one. Names are chosen for sound and meaning together, usually a one-character surname plus a one- or two-character given name, and transliterating letter by letter produces something that reads as a foreign noise rather than a name. The name generator builds a real one instead.
Why does a character render in some styles but not others?
Glyph coverage varies by font. The brush and cursive faces were drawn for the common modern character set, so rare characters and most traditional forms fall outside them and drop back to the standard print face. If a character looks unchanged across several styles, that is what happened.
Do these styles work with simplified characters?
Yes, and the relationship runs deeper than compatibility. When the simplified set was standardized in 1956, a number of its forms were taken directly from cursive shorthand that scribes had used for centuries: shu, wei, dong and che among them. In those cases the cursive rendering is not a stylization of the simplified character; the simplified character is a tidied-up copy of the cursive one.
Not sure which character you want yet? Browse the symbols and their meanings
Expecting? The most-asked question we answer has nothing to do with handwriting: try the Chinese gender predictor