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Wo (kana)

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Character of the Japanese writing system

wo
hiragana katakana
transliteration	(w)o
hiragana origin	遠
katakana origin	乎
Man'yōgana	乎 呼 遠 鳥 怨 越 少 小 尾 麻 男 緒 雄
spelling kana	尾張のヲ (W)owari no "(w)o"
unicode	U+3092, U+30F2
braille

を, in hiragana, or ヲinkatakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. Both are phonemically /wo/, reflected in the Nihon-shiki wo, although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is [o] ^ⓘ, reflected in the Hepburn romanization and Kunrei-shiki Romanization^[1] o.

Modern usage[edit]

In the 1946 orthographic reforms, を was largely replaced by お. 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 うぉorウォ instead.

Despite originally representing [wo], the syllable is pronounced [o] by almost all modern speakers. Singers may pronounce it with the [w], as may those attempting to emphasize the syllable for clarity. Apart from some literate speakers who have revived [wo] as a spelling pronunciation, though, this [w] sound is extinct in the modern spoken language.

InRomaji, the kana is transliterated variably as ⟨o⟩or⟨wo⟩, with the former being faithful to standard pronunciation, but the latter avoiding confusion with お and オ. を is transliterated as oinModified Hepburn and Kunrei and as wo in Traditional Hepburn and Nippon-shiki.

Katakana ヲ can sometimes be combined with a dakuten, ヺ, to represent a /vo/ 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 /o~wo/; in the Ryukyu University system it is /o/, whereas おis/ʔo/. Katakana ヲ is used in Ainu for /wo/.

Stroke order[edit]

Other communicative representations[edit]

Japanese Navy Signal Flag	Japanese semaphore	Japanese manual syllabary (fingerspelling)	Braille dots-35 Japanese Braille

• Full Braille representation

を / ヲinJapanese Braille
を / ヲ wo	をう / ヲー wō	ヺ vo	ヺー vō

• Computer encodings

Look up を orヲ in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

References[edit]