Tsu ( hiragana: つ, katakana: ツ) 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 ...

. Both are phonemically although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is . The small kana っ/ッ, known as sokuon, are identical but somewhat smaller. They are mainly used to indicate consonant gemination and commonly used at the end of lines of dialogue in fictional works as a symbol for a

glottal stop The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...

. The dakuten forms づ, ヅ, pronounced the same as the dakuten forms of the su kana in most dialects (see yotsugana), are uncommon. They are primarily used for indicating a voiced consonant in the middle of a compound word (see rendaku), and they can never begin a word. In the

Ainu language Ainu (, ), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate ...

, it can be written with a handakuten (which can be entered into a computer as either one character (ツ゚) or two combined characters (ツ゜) to represent the sound , which is interchangeable with the katakana ト゚. The katakana form has become popular as an emoticon in the Western world due to its resemblance to a smiling face and as part of a " shrug" emoticon, known alternatively as

Shruggie This is a list of notable and commonly used ''emoticons'', or textual portrayals of a writer's moods or facial expressions in the form of icons. Originally, these icons consisted of ASCII art, and later, Shift JIS art and Unicode art. In re ...

, rendered as: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . *ヅァ, ヅェ and ヅォ are used in gairaigos; these pronunciations are not same as ズァ (zwa), ズェ (zwe) and ズォ (zwo).

Stroke order

Other communicative representations

See also

References