カタカナ

Japanese

For pronunciation and definitions of カタカナ – see the following entry.

【片仮名かたかな】 [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

(This term, カタカナ (katakana), is the katakana spelling of the above term.)