Chinese Symbols and Their Meanings

Where most people start

Six characters account for most of what people come here looking for.

• 爱 love ài A hand reaching down over a heart, giving something away. The heart was removed in the simplified form, which people still argue about.
• 力 strength lì Two strokes, the fewest of any character here, and the one most often asked for as a tattoo.
• 家 family jiā A roof with a pig underneath, because a household that kept livestock indoors was a household that would eat.
• 福 good luck fú The New Year character, pasted on doors upside down so that luck "arrives," a pun that only works out loud.
• 和 peace hé Grain on the left, a mouth on the right. Everyone fed, nobody fighting.
• 死 death sǐ Bare bones beside a kneeling figure. Blunt, and the reason the number four makes some buildings skip a floor.

How a Chinese character carries meaning

Around the year 100 CE a scholar named Xu Shen finished a dictionary that took apart 9,353 characters and asked, of each one, why it looks the way it does. His son presented it to the Han emperor in 121 CE. The Shuowen Jiezi is still the book every serious answer starts from, and it sorted characters into six ways of being built. Four of them explain nearly everything you will meet on this site.

Pictures xiàngxíng

The oldest and rarest kind: a drawing that got squared off over three thousand years of writing. Water 水 is a stream with eddies either side. Fire 火 is a flame with sparks. These are the characters people expect all of them to be, and they are roughly 5% of what you use daily.

Assembled ideas huìyì

Two or more parts put together to mean something neither says alone. Warrior 武 is a dagger-axe plus a foot, which the classical tradition famously reads as "stopping the weapon" rather than swinging it. Death 死 sets broken bones beside a kneeling mourner. These are the characters that read like tiny scenes.

Meaning plus sound xíngshēng

The workhorse, and the one that surprises people: about 58% of the characters in frequent modern use are built this way. One component points at the general meaning, the other tells you roughly how to say it. Good luck 福 carries the altar radical for the sense, sacred business, and a second element purely for the sound. Peace 和 takes a mouth for the sense and a stalk of grain for the pronunciation. Half of the character is a spelling hint.

Borrowed characters jiǎjiè

Sometimes a word had no character, so writers grabbed one that merely sounded right and kept it. The everyday character for listening 听 is a mouth and an ax, which makes no sense for hearing, because it was borrowed. The traditional form 聽 has the ear you would expect. When a character looks illogical, a borrowing is usually why.

This matters for a practical reason. Once you know a character is meaning-plus-sound, you stop hunting for poetry in the half that is only there to rhyme. A great deal of bad writing about Chinese symbols comes from reading the phonetic component as if it were symbolism.

Every character, at a glance

Where a traditional form differs from the simplified one, both are shown.

Browse by theme

Five of the characters under virtue are not a theme but a set. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness are the Five Constants of Confucian ethics, and the list was four before a Han court philosopher needed a fifth. The system page has the whole scheme in one table and the seam where it grew.

One of these characters names something that also walks through the stories. The dragon is a word, a radical, and a creature with a court, a temper and a job. Where the character page stops at what the word means, the mythology pages carry the figure, and the phoenix and black tortoise beside it, through the texts that first wrote them down.

Want to write them yourself? Every character here has a free printable practice sheet, no signup needed.

Chinese good luck symbols, and the three things people mean

Search for Chinese good luck symbols and you are handed a shuffled deck: a character pasted on a door, a brass toad on a shelf, a bat carved into the back of a chair. All three are real. They come from three different systems, and most of the confusion in English comes from lists that present them as one. Sorting them is most of the work.

The ones you write

A small set of characters does nearly all the lucky work in Chinese. Good luck 福 is the one on every doorway at Lunar New Year, often upside down on purpose. Double happiness 囍 is the wedding emblem, a character invented by doubling another one. Longevity 寿 goes on birthday bowls, and prosperity 富 on anything to do with money. If you want the single luckiest symbol, it is 福, and the reason is partly economic: a sheet of red paper and a brush and you have one. It is the cheapest lucky thing in the culture and by a wide margin the most used.

The ones you buy

The second kind is an object: the wealth beast on a bracelet, the three-legged money frog, a string of Qing coins, a knot, a carved jade disc. These come from a market rather than from a single tradition, and the market cheerfully sells a Chinese mythical animal, a Tibetan bead and a Buddhist counting string off the same rail. They also have a much worse ratio of confidence to evidence than the characters do, because the object is usually old and the luck claim attached to it usually is not. Chinese good luck charms sorts that shelf by which tradition each piece actually comes from.

The ones that are puns

The third kind is a joke about pronunciation, and once you see it you see it everywhere. Chinese decorative art is full of bats, an animal the West files under Halloween, because the word for bat sounds exactly like the word for blessing. Fish turn up at New Year because the word for fish sounds like surplus, and a dragon is on the robe for reasons that are not a pun at all. A rebus is not a lesser kind of symbol here. It is the main engine of the decorative tradition, and it is why so much Chinese ornament looks like a wish spelled out in animals.

Two counts that circulate wrong

People often go looking for the four Chinese blessings. The classical list has five. In the "Great Plan" chapter of the Book of Documents, among the oldest of the Chinese classics, the good life is counted out as long life, riches, soundness of body and serenity of mind, love of virtue, and fulfilling to the end the will of Heaven. That is the wufu, and it is what a doorway means when it wishes five blessings on a household. There is a famous four in Chinese, but it is a different list: the four joys, collected in a Song-dynasty children's primer, which are rain after a long drought, meeting an old friend far from home, the night of your wedding, and seeing your name on the examination roll. Blessings are what heaven sends. Joys are what happens to you.

The other count people arrive with is twelve. Almost always they mean the twelve zodiac animals, which are a calendar rather than a set of lucky emblems: each one names a year, and yours is decided by when you were born rather than by what you like. There is a second twelve, much less known, and it is the grander one. The Twelve Ornaments are the emblems reserved for the emperor's ceremonial robe, sun and moon and stars, mountain, dragon, pheasant, sacrificial cups, waterweed, fire, grain, axe and a back-to-back figure of distinction. They are named in the same Book of Documents, and only one man in the empire was entitled to wear all twelve.

Two ways to write the same word

Mainland China promulgated its Character Simplification Scheme in 1956 and published the complete list in 1986. Simplified forms are standard in mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore; Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan kept the traditional forms. Neither is a corruption of the other, and neither is more authentic. Many characters were never touched at all, which is why most of the set below looks identical in both systems.

Of the 31 characters here, 9 are written differently in the two systems:

• 龙 / 龍 dragon
• 乐 / 樂 happiness
• 我爱你 / 我愛你 i love you
• 听 / 聽 listening
• 寿 / 壽 longevity
• 爱 / 愛 love
• 礼 / 禮 propriety
• 义 / 義 righteousness
• 战 / 戰 war

If a character is going on your skin or your wall, pick one system on purpose and stay in it. Mixing the two in a single piece is the most common mistake in Western Chinese-character design, and it reads to anyone literate the way a sentence would if you swapped fonts halfway through.

Is it Chinese, Japanese, or just "Asian"?

People often arrive here looking for an Asian symbol for a word, and the honest answer is that no such thing exists. Asia writes in dozens of scripts, most of them unrelated to Chinese: hangul in Korea, Devanagari across northern India, Thai, Arabic through the west of the continent. What the phrase almost always means is a Chinese character, because that is the one script that traveled far enough to be borrowed by its neighbors and to end up standing, in English, for a whole continent. So if you came for an Asian symbol for love or strength, you are in the right place. The character is Chinese, and every entry here says what it means to someone who actually reads it.

As for Chinese or Japanese: usually both. Japan borrowed the Chinese writing system around the fifth century and still uses those characters, under the name kanji. Strength 力 is written identically in Beijing and Tokyo and means the same thing in both. It is simply read differently: lì in Mandarin, riki or chikara in Japanese. When an entry on this site carries one of the traps, a form that is distinctly Japanese or a meaning that drifted after it crossed the sea, the entry says so.

Chinese characters vs. Japanese takes the whole question apart: the one-second test for telling the two scripts apart, the characters that ended up with three different official forms, and the false friends.

Before you get one tattooed

Most of the horror stories are avoidable, and none of them require you to speak Chinese. The short version: read the character's whole range of meaning rather than a one-word gloss, choose simplified or traditional on purpose and never mix them in one design, give your artist a reference file instead of a description, and treat any phrase longer than a set four-character idiom as a risk.

The full version is its own page: the eight ways a Chinese tattoo goes wrong, which sorts the failures by type, works out what stroke count does to a character at real tattoo sizes, and answers the question about characters for men and characters for women.

Every entry here carries the notes a tattoo needs: which forms exist, which are wrong, and what the character actually says to someone who reads it. You can also see any character rendered in classic scripts with the calligraphy generator before you commit to a shape.

Make a character your own

Fortune

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The legendary palace chart, read honestly, with the baby's zodiac reading included.

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See any character in classic scripts, from ancient seal to flying cursive.

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Common questions

Sources

• Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (compiled 100 CE, presented 121 CE), the first systematic analysis of Chinese character structure. Reference
• Proportions of character formation types in modern use. Chinese character classification
• Simplification Scheme dates and regional usage. Simplified Chinese characters
• The Five Blessings, enumerated in the Book of Documents, in James Legge's translation. Shang Shu, Great Plan
• The Twelve Ornaments of the imperial robe, named in a different chapter of the same classic. Shang Shu, Yi and Ji
• Per-character forms, readings, radicals and stroke counts follow Zdic, with each entry's own classical citations listed on its page.

Last updated September 11, 2026