かたかな

Japanese

Definitions

For pronunciation and definitions of かたかな – see the following entry.

【片仮名】 [noun] Katakana, a set of Japanese syllabary characters, secondary to hiragana, derived from portions of Chinese characters whose sounds approximate the Japanese sound being represented. Chiefly thought of as being used for loanwords (cf. カタカナ語 (“loanword”, literally “katakana word”)), it has a number of other uses too, complementing hiragana; see Katakana on Wikipedia.Wikipedia Alternative spelling カタカナ

(This term, かたかな (katakana), is the hiragana spelling of the above term.)