The characters inscribed on the reverse sides of the pieces to indicate promotion may be in red ink, and are usually cursive. The characters on the backs of the pieces that promote to gold generals are cursive variants of 'gold', becoming more cursive (more abbreviated) as the value of the original piece decreases. These cursive forms have these equivalents in print: for promoted silver, for promoted knight, for promoted lance, and for promoted pawn (tokin). Another typographic convention has abbreviated versions of the original values, with a reduced number of strokes: for a promoted knight , for a promoted lance , and the as above for a promoted silver, but (a hiragana symbol for the syllable "to") for "tokin".