Japanese Hiragana

Hiragana syllables developed from Chinese characters. Hiragana was originally called onnade or 'women's hand' as were used mainly by women and men wrote in kanji and katakana. By the 10th century, hiragana was used by everybody. The word hiragana means "ordinary syllabic script".

In early versions of hiragana there were often many different characters to represent the same syllable; however the system was eventually simplified so that there was a one to one relationship between spoken and written syllables. The present orthography of hiragana was codified by the Japanese government in 1946.


In column the rōmaji appears on the left, the hiragana symbols in the middle and the kanji from which they developed on the right. There is some dispute about which kanji the hiragana developed from.