Chinese symbol for “happen”
发生
fā shēng
Traditional: 發生
to happen; to occur; to take place; to arise (e.g. 发生问题 (fā shēng wèn tí) "a problem arises")
The closest CC-CEDICT match for happen is 发生 (fā shēng), defined as: to happen; to occur; to take place; to arise (e.g. 发生问题 (fā shēng wèn tí) "a problem arises").
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
Traditional forms
Other Chinese words for “happen”
Related words
Other words that share a character with 发生.
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 发展 (發展) | fā zhǎn | development; growth |
| 发现 (發現) | fā xiàn | to notice; to become aware of; to discover; to find; to detect |
| 开发 (開發) | kāi fā | to exploit (a resource); to open up (for development); to develop |
| 发布 (發佈) | fā bù | variant of 发布 (fā bù) |
| 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 |
See also: Japanese symbol for “happen”.
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.