Skip to main content

For questions about Chinese characters and/or language found on seals, stamps, inscriptions, hand signatures, paintings, etc.

Seals in China, and East Asia, are essentially stamps used to impress names or other marks on a variety of supports.

Seal script, also called 篆书 zhuànshū (trad. 篆書), is a writing style particularly hard to recognize for untrained eyes, as it's based on very old, or even ancient, character forms. Characters that are common in modern Mandarin may also appear in obscure variants.

Questions about characters written in seal script, regardless of which support they are found on, are on-topic. Please use this tag to identify such questions.

Identification of characters in cursive script may also be accepted, but if it isn't 篆书, please don't use this tag. Try with [calligraphy] or [handwriting] instead.

It's okay if you can't tell what script your text is. Use the tag you deem most appropriate, but be aware that someone might retag your question later on. This is to ensure questions are well categorized, which makes it more likely you get answers from domain experts.

Final note:
If your question is about identifying characters in plain script, irrespective of image quality, an OCR tool may be your best option. Please see the thread How do I self-answer “What does this say?” for further guidance. If you don't reasonably show any prior effort to decipher plain script, your question may be deemed off-topic and closed.