を, in

hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...

, or ヲ in

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...

, is one of the Japanese

kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...

, each of which represents one mora. 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 In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from ...

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 kana is

transliterated Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

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 for .

Modern usage

Stroke order

Other communicative representations

References