Chinese symbol for “career”
生涯
shēng yá
career; life (way in which sb lives); period of one's life
The closest CC-CEDICT match for career is 生涯 (shēng yá), defined as: career; life (way in which sb lives); period of one's life.
Before using these characters for a tattoo, check them with a native speaker. Dictionary words often have several meanings, and the right choice depends on context.
Characters and stroke order
Other Chinese words for “career”
Related words
Other words that share a character with 生涯.
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 发生 (發生) | fā shēng | to happen; to occur; to take place; to arise (e.g. 发生问题 (fā shēng wèn tí) "a problem arises") |
| 生活 | shēng huó | to live; life |
| 学生 (學生) | xué sheng | student; schoolchild |
| 生产 (生產) | shēng chǎn | to produce; to manufacture; to give birth to a child |
| 产生 (產生) | chǎn shēng | to arise; to come into being; to come about; to give rise to; to bring into being; to bring about; to produce; to engender; to generate |
| 先生 | xiān sheng | teacher; gentleman; sir; mister (Mr.) |
| 天涯 | tiān yá | the other end of the world; a faraway place |
| 天涯海角 | tiān yá hǎi jiǎo | the ends of the earth; separated worlds apart |
See also: Japanese symbol for “career”.
Data: CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0); Unihan Database (Unicode License v3); Make Me a Hanzi (Arphic Public License (graphics.txt); LGPL-3.0-or-later (dictionary.txt)); wordfreq (CC BY-SA 4.0 (data)). Retrieved 2026-10-22.