を, in
hiragana, or ヲ in
katakana, is one of the Japanese
kana, each of which represents one
mora
Mora may refer to:
People
* Mora (surname)
Places Sweden
* Mora, Säter, Sweden
* Mora, Sweden, the seat of Mora Municipality
* Mora Municipality, Sweden
United States
* Mora, Louisiana, an unincorporated community
* Mora, Minnesota, a city
* M ...
. The combination of a W-column kana letter with ゛を゙ in hiragana was introduced to represent
oin the 19th century and 20th century.
Modern usage
In Japanese, this kana is used almost exclusively for a
particle for both forms; therefore, the katakana form (ヲ) is rare in everyday language mostly seen in all-katakana text. A "wo" sound is usually represented as うお or ウォ instead.
Despite originally representing , the syllable is pronounced by almost all modern speakers. Singers may pronounce it with the
as may those attempting to emphasize the syllable for clarity. Apart from some literate speakers who have revived
oas a spelling pronunciation, though, this sound is extinct in the modern spoken language.
In
Romaji
The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as .
Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Ch ...
, the kana is
transliterated variably as or , with the former being faithful to standard pronunciation, but the latter avoiding confusion with
お and オ. Katakana ヲ can sometimes be combined with a dakuten, ヺ, to represent a sound in foreign words; however, most
IMEs lack a convenient way to do this. The combination ヴォ is used far more frequently to represent the /vo/ sound.
Hiragana を is still used in several
Okinawan orthographies for the syllable ; in the Ryukyu University system it is , whereas お is . Katakana ヲ is used in
Ainu
Ainu or Aynu may refer to:
*Ainu people, an East Asian ethnic group of Japan and the Russian Far East
*Ainu languages, a family of languages
**Ainu language of Hokkaido
**Kuril Ainu language, extinct language of the Kuril Islands
**Sakhalin Ainu la ...
for .
Stroke order
Other communicative representations
* Full Braille representation
*
Computer encodings
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:O (Kana)
Specific kana