Wa (kana)

Wa (hiragana: わ, katakana: ワ) is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. The combination of a W-column kana letter with わ゙ in hiragana was introduced to represent [va] in the 19th century and 20th century. It represents [wa] and has origins in the character 和. There is also a small ゎ/ヮ, that is used to write the morae /kwa/ and /gwa/ (くゎ, ぐゎ), which are almost obsolete in contemporary standard Japanese but still exist in the Ryukyuan languages. A few loanword such as シークヮーサー(shiikwaasa from Okinawan language) and ムジカ・アンティクヮ・ケルン (Musica Antiqua Köln, German early music group) contains this letter in Japanese. Katakana ワ is also sometimes written with dakuten, ヷ, to represent a /va/ sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this. It is far more common to represent the /va/ sound with the digraph ヴァ.

Form	Rōmaji	Hiragana	Katakana
Normal w- (わ行 wa-gyō)	wa	わ	ワ
	waa wā	わあ わー	ワア ワー

wa
hiragana katakana
transliteration	wa
hiragana origin	和
katakana origin	和
Man'yōgana	和 丸 輪
spelling kana	わらびのワ Warabi no "wa"
unicode	U+308F, U+30EF
braille

The kana は (ha) is read as “wa” when it represents a particle.

Stroke order

Stroke order in writing わ

Stroke order in writing ワ

Stroke order in writing わ

Stroke order in writing ワ

Other communicative representations

Japanese radiotelephony alphabet	Wabun code
わらびのワ Warabi no "Wa"	▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ⓘ

Japanese Navy Signal Flag	Japanese semaphore	Japanese manual syllabary (fingerspelling)	Braille dots-3 Japanese Braille

• Full Braille representation

わ / ワ in Japanese Braille
わ / ワ wa	ヷ va	わあ / ワー wā	ヷー vā

• Computer encodings

Character information

Preview	わ		ワ		ﾜ		🋀
Unicode name	HIRAGANA LETTER WA		KATAKANA LETTER WA		HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER WA		HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER SMALL WA
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex	dec	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	12431	U+308F	12527	U+30EF	65436	U+FF9C	127680	U+1F2C0
UTF-8	227 130 143	E3 82 8F	227 131 175	E3 83 AF	239 190 156	EF BE 9C	240 159 139 128	F0 9F 8B 80
UTF-16	12431	308F	12527	30EF	65436	FF9C	55356 57024	D83C DEC0
Numeric character reference	わ	わ	ワ	ワ	ﾜ	ﾜ	🋀	🋀
Shift JIS[1]	130 237	82 ED	131 143	83 8F	220	DC
EUC-JP[2]	164 239	A4 EF	165 239	A5 EF	142 220	8E DC
GB 18030[3]	164 239	A4 EF	165 239	A5 EF	132 49 155 54	84 31 9B 36
EUC-KR[4] / UHC[5]	170 239	AA EF	171 239	AB EF
Big5 (non-ETEN kana)[6]	198 243	C6 F3	199 169	C7 A9
Big5 (ETEN / HKSCS)[7]	199 118	C7 76	199 235	C7 EB

Character information

Preview	ゎ		ヮ		ヷ		㋻
Unicode name	HIRAGANA LETTER SMALL WA		KATAKANA LETTER SMALL WA		KATAKANA LETTER VA		CIRCLED KATAKANA WA
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex	dec	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	12430	U+308E	12526	U+30EE	12535	U+30F7	13051	U+32FB
UTF-8	227 130 142	E3 82 8E	227 131 174	E3 83 AE	227 131 183	E3 83 B7	227 139 187	E3 8B BB
Numeric character reference	ゎ	ゎ	ヮ	ヮ	ヷ	ヷ	㋻	㋻
Shift JIS (plain)[1]	130 236	82 EC	131 142	83 8E
Shift JIS (KanjiTalk 7)[8]	130 236	82 EC	131 142	83 8E	136 106	88 6A
Shift JIS-2004[9]	130 236	82 EC	131 142	83 8E	132 146	84 92
EUC-JP (plain)[2]	164 238	A4 EE	165 238	A5 EE
EUC-JIS-2004[10]	164 238	A4 EE	165 238	A5 EE	167 242	A7 F2
GB 18030[3]	164 238	A4 EE	165 238	A5 EE	129 57 167 53	81 39 A7 35
EUC-KR[4] / UHC[5]	170 238	AA EE	171 238	AB EE
Big5 (non-ETEN kana)[6]	198 242	C6 F2	199 168	C7 A8
Big5 (ETEN / HKSCS)[7]	199 117	C7 75	199 234	C7 EA

References

1. Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) [1994-03-08]. "Shift-JIS to Unicode".
2. Unicode Consortium; IBM. "EUC-JP-2007". International Components for Unicode.
3. Standardization Administration of China (SAC) (2005-11-18). GB 18030-2005: Information Technology—Chinese coded character set.
4. Unicode Consortium; IBM. "IBM-970". International Components for Unicode.
5. Steele, Shawn (2000). "cp949 to Unicode table". Microsoft / Unicode Consortium.
6. Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) [1994-02-11]. "BIG5 to Unicode table (complete)".
7. van Kesteren, Anne. "big5". Encoding Standard. WHATWG.
8. Apple Computer (2005-04-05) [1995-04-15]. "Map (external version) from Mac OS Japanese encoding to Unicode 2.1 and later". Unicode Consortium.
9. Project X0213 (2009-05-03). "Shift_JIS-2004 (JIS X 0213:2004 Appendix 1) vs Unicode mapping table".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
10. Project X0213 (2009-05-03). "EUC-JIS-2004 (JIS X 0213:2004 Appendix 3) vs Unicode mapping table".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)