Calligraphy
Chinese Calligraphy Generator
Type an English word, or a word in any language, and get it as Chinese brush calligraphy: the tool turns it into the right character first, then shows that character in eight classic hands, from Qin seal script to a loose, flying cursive. Pick the one you like and save it as a print-ready image. Already have the character? Type it straight in. Good for choosing a look before a tattoo, a card, or a piece of art.
Any language, up to twenty 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
Your piece
Brush · 福
Twice screen resolution, with a small Jade Almanac seal in the corner. The transparent PNG is the ink alone, no paper and no mark, for laying over your own design; the SVG is the same ink as vector outlines, sharp at any size, for a cutter, an engraver or a tattoo stencil. The PDF is the whole piece, paper and all, sized at 300 dpi for printing. The inscription sits where a signature would; a seal you carve below goes under it. These are digital typefaces drawn after calligraphic hands, a fast way to compare looks before you settle on one; they are not brushwork.
Seal script: Chong Xi Small Seal, Academia Sinica, CC BY-ND 3.0 TW. Other faces: Google Fonts, SIL Open Font License.
There is one set of characters nobody chooses: the eight the calendar assigns you at birth, two for the year, two each for month, day and hour. That reading is named after them, 八字, eight characters. See the eight for your birthday
Chinese seal generator
Carve a seal of your own: a Chinese seal generator and chop maker
A piece of calligraphy is not signed with a pen. It is stamped, with a small stone seal: one to four characters, red on white or white on red. Carve one here and watch it land on the paper, then stamp it under the inscription on your piece above, or save it on its own.
Your seal
Right column first, top to bottom. Seal script uses the Chong Xi Small Seal face after the Shuowen forms; a simplified character is then cut as the form it came from. A digital design for signing your own work, not an official seal.
The red stamp on a painting, and what is on it
Chinese art is signed twice: once with the brush, and once with a seal pressed in cinnabar paste under the signature. The seal carries the artist's name, or a studio name, or a phrase they liked; collectors then added their own as a work passed through their hands, which is why an old scroll can carry a crowd of red squares and the Qianlong Emperor's favorites carry dozens of his alone. Red characters on a white ground are , cut in relief; white characters in a red field are , cut into the stone. Read a seal right column first, top to bottom.
The five hands, and which one you are looking at
Chinese calligraphy is taught as five scripts: seal, clerical, cursive, running and regular, listed in roughly the order each appeared. That order contains a surprise, because the wild, barely legible cursive hand is older than the neat regular one every schoolchild starts with; scribes were already writing fast, and the tidy hand was the thing that had to be invented. The history of the five, how to read a stroke, a character and a whole scroll, and the three works people have argued about for a thousand years are on the calligraphy guide. This page is about seeing your own word in each hand.
What this generator covers, and what it does not
The eight tiles above run from the oldest hand to the fastest. Seal is the Chong Xi Small Seal face, drawn at Academia Sinica after the small-seal forms recorded in the Shuowen Jiezi; eleven thousand seal glyphs make a 22 MB file, so it fetches in the background once you start typing rather than with the page. Regular is a true kai face, the hand schoolchildren learn. Print is the Song face of modern books, a printer's cut of the same script, and Elegant is fangsong, the compromise between the two. 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.
- Seal script · Seal
- Cursive script · Cursive
- Running script · Running hand, Bold brush, Brush
- Regular script · Regular, Print, Elegant
Clerical script is still missing, and that is a limitation worth stating rather than hiding. It needs a glyph set drawn character by character from Han stelae, and no free web font covers it at the quality this page would want. Seal script had the same problem until 2022, when Academia Sinica released its face; this page said the same thing about seal until then.
One more thing seal script cannot do: simplified characters. It predates every one of them by two thousand years, so a simplified character is shown as the form it was simplified from, 爱 as 愛, 龙 as 龍, and the tile says so. A few characters have no seal form at all, 囍 among them, because they were invented long after anyone wrote seal script.
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.
Cursive generator
Chinese cursive script, and what it does to a character
Cursive, , is the fastest hand: strokes merge, components shrink to a flick, and a character can become a single unbroken line. It is the hand people mean by "Chinese cursive generator", and the one most often chosen for tattoos and ink pieces because it reads as motion. It is also the one a native reader may struggle with, which is why the same three characters are shown here in cursive, running hand and brush. Every tile on this page is live text in the face named, not a picture.
福 fú · fortune
龙 lóng · dragon
爱 ài · love
Large: Cursive (Liu Jian Mao Cao). Small: Running hand (Zhi Mang Xing) and Brush (Long Cang). All three are SIL Open Font License faces drawn after calligraphic hands.
Chinese calligraphy generator from English
Type an English word and press "See it in Chinese," and one of two things happens. If the word is one of the 35 entries we have written up, love, strength, peace, family and the rest, you get our sourced character and a link to its entry, which tells you what it means, how it is built and where it can go wrong. Any other word goes to a machine translation, labeled as one. Treat that result as a first draft, because English words rarely map one to one. Peace can be 和, harmony between people, or 平安, being safe from harm, and a translator picks one without telling you there was a choice.
You can also skip the Chinese entirely. Brush, Running hand, Bold brush and Cursive all write English letters with the same brush that writes the characters, so a name or a word in the Latin alphabet comes out looking brushed rather than typed. Keep it short: the piece wraps at ten letters a line. Copy and paste carries plain characters, not the calligraphy, so what you take away is the image: PNG, SVG or PDF.
Chinese calligraphy tattoo generator
Settle the character first, then the hand. Most Chinese tattoo regrets are the wrong character or a mangled one, and a beautiful cursive rescues neither. Once the character is right, choose the hand by how it will be read. Regular is the one any Chinese reader recognizes at a glance. Running hand and Bold brush keep that legibility with more movement. Cursive looks the most like calligraphy and is the most likely to draw a puzzled look from a native reader, which some people want and everyone should know before the needle.
For the artist, save the SVG: vector outlines scale to any size without blurring, which is what a stencil needs. The transparent PNG works for placing the design on a photo of the spot. Dense characters need room, since strokes that sit close together blur into each other as tattoo ink spreads over the years; the guide to Chinese tattoos covers that and the other ways a character goes wrong on skin. The Google faces here are released under the SIL Open Font License, which places no restriction on the images you make with them.
Chinese calligraphy name generator
A name is the one thing not to type in and translate. Chinese names are chosen for sound and meaning together, and a translator handed "Grace" or "Hunter" returns the dictionary meaning of the English word, not a name. There are two honest routes. A transliteration keeps the sound: Anna becomes 安娜, as in the Chinese title of Anna Karenina. A Chinese name is chosen instead, usually a surname plus one or two characters picked for what they mean, and the name generator builds one from the sound of yours.
Either way, bring the characters back here. Two or more stack top to bottom, the way a hanging scroll reads, with "Stack vertically," and the same characters cut as a name seal are how a Chinese painter signs a finished piece.
Questions people actually ask
What are the five main types 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. The history of all five, with the texts that record it, is on our calligraphy guide. This generator covers four of the five: seal, regular, running and cursive. Clerical is the one still missing.
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. The seal face is the exception in the other direction: it covers eleven thousand characters, but only in the forms that existed when seal script was written, so a simplified character is shown as the form it was simplified from, and the tile says so when that happens.
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.
How can I convert text to Chinese calligraphy font?
Type the character, or the word, into the box at the top. It renders at once in eight hands, from seal script to cursive. Click the one you want, choose a paper and a mounting, add an inscription and a seal if you like, and save the result as a PNG at twice screen resolution, on paper or as transparent ink alone, as a vector SVG of the ink, or as a PDF ready to print. There is nothing to install and no account; the faces are web fonts, so the file is drawn in your own browser.
Can I copy and paste Chinese calligraphy?
Not as text. A calligraphy font only shows as calligraphy where that font is installed, so pasting the characters into a chat or a document hands over plain characters in whatever face the other side has. What travels is the picture. Save the PNG and paste that, or share it straight from the page; the transparent PNG drops the paper, so the ink can sit on any background. The characters themselves you can copy with the Copy characters button: they are ordinary Chinese, not a special alphabet.
Can I make Chinese calligraphy from an English word or name?
Yes, in three ways. Type an English word and press "See it in Chinese": if it is one of the characters we have written up, you get our sourced character with a link to its entry; otherwise you get a machine translation, labeled as such, worth checking before you commit to it. For a name, do not translate it: use the name generator, which builds a real Chinese name for sound and meaning, then bring it here. And the English word itself can be the piece: the Brush, Running hand, Bold brush and Cursive faces all write Latin letters with a brush.
What font looks like Chinese writing?
If you mean English letters drawn to look Chinese, the "wonton" or "chop suey" lettering of old takeaway signs, no serious face does that and this page does not either; it reads as a costume. If you mean an English word written with a Chinese brush, that is a different thing, and the brush faces here do it: type your word and pick Brush, Running hand, Bold brush or Cursive. The strokes come from the same hands that write the Chinese characters.
Does this generator use AI?
Not for the characters. Every character is drawn from a typeface, which is why it cannot come out wrong: an image model asked for a Chinese character will sometimes invent a stroke, and a stroke is the difference between one word and another. The things around the character, the paper textures, the silk mountings and the stone seal still-life, were made with an image model and checked by hand, and none of them contain writing.
Can I write vertically, or use traditional characters?
Both. Two or more characters can be stacked top to bottom, the way a scroll reads. Traditional characters render in every face: type them directly, or type the simplified form and pick the seal tile, which shows the form the character had before simplification, since seal script predates every simplified form.
What is the red stamp on Chinese paintings?
A seal, pressed in cinnabar paste. The artist stamps one under the signature, usually a name seal, and sometimes a second with a studio name or a motto. Later owners added their own, which is why an old scroll can carry a crowd of them: the Qianlong Emperor covered his favorite pieces with dozens. Read one right column first, top to bottom. Red characters on a white ground are zhuwen, carved in relief; white characters on a red ground are baiwen, carved into the stone.
What is a Chinese signature stamp called?
A seal, yinzhang in Mandarin, or a chop, the English word that came through India from the Hindi for a stamp. On a painting it is the artist's signature and the owner's mark at once. A personal one carries a name; a leisure seal carries a phrase. The seal maker on this page cuts either, in a brush hand or in seal script, red on white or white on red.
How do you read a Chinese seal?
Column by column, starting at the top right and reading down, then the next column to the left. A four-character seal therefore reads top right, bottom right, top left, bottom left. A single character stands alone; two stack; three usually get a tall seal rather than a square one. Seal script is the hard part: it is a form of the characters from before the Han dynasty, so even fluent readers often need to work a seal out character by character.
Made to order
Your word, as a finished piece; your seal, in stone
The composer above is a typeface on paper. This is the other thing: your character, or your English word, worked up as a finished artwork, as a cinnabar seal or in black ink, and delivered as a print you can frame. Four words are done. Tell us yours, and you are first in line when orders open.
In stone
Have yours carved in stone
A seal you design in the seal maker above, cut by hand into jade-toned soapstone and boxed with its own tin of cinnabar paste. Press it into the corner of a letter, a painting, a book you are giving away, and it is signed the way Chinese art has been signed for two thousand years.
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Expecting? The most-asked question we answer has nothing to do with handwriting: try the Chinese gender predictor