Wo (kana)

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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 in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. The combination of a W-column kana letter with ゛を゙ in hiragana was introduced to represent [vo] in the 19th century and 20th century.

Modern usage[]

In Japanese, this kana is used almost exclusively for a particle; therefore, the katakana form (ヲ) is fairly uncommon in everyday language — mostly used as a stand-in for its hiragana counterpart in texts that need to be written entirely in katakana.

Despite originally representing [ɰo], 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.

In Romaji, 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. 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.

A "wo" sound is usually represented in katakana as ウォ instead. For example, ウォークマン (Wōkuman, "Walkman") and ウォッカ (Wokka, "Vodka")

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[]

Stroke order in writing を

Stroke order in writing ヲ

Stroke order in writing を

Stroke order in writing ヲ

Other communicative representations[]

Japanese radiotelephony alphabet	Wabun code
尾張のヲ Wowari no "Wo"	▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄

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

• Full Braille representation

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

• Computer encodings