し, in

hiragana is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", ...

, or シ in

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

, is one of the Japanese

kana are syllabary, syllabaries used to write Japanese phonology, Japanese phonological units, Mora (linguistics), morae. In current usage, ''kana'' most commonly refers to ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. It can also refer to their ancestor , wh ...

, which each represent one mora. Both represent the phonemes , reflected in the

Nihon-shiki , romanized as in the system itself, is a romanization system for transliterating the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet. Among the major romanization systems for Japanese, it is the most regular one and has an almost one-to-one rel ...

and

Kunrei-shiki , also known as the Monbusho system (named after the endonym for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) or MEXT system, is the Cabinet-ordered romanization system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Lat ...

romanization si, although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is , which is reflected in the

Hepburn romanization is the main system of Romanization of Japanese, romanization for the Japanese language. The system was originally published in 1867 by American Christian missionary and physician James Curtis Hepburn as the standard in the first edition of h ...

shi. The shapes of these kana have origins in the character 之. The katakana form has become increasingly popular as an

emoticon An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for emotion icon, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using Character (symbol), characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers and Alphabet, letters—to express a person's feelings, mood ...

in the

Western world The Western world, also known as the West, primarily refers to various nations and state (polity), states in Western Europe, Northern America, and Australasia; with some debate as to whether those in Eastern Europe and Latin America also const ...

due to its resemblance to a smiling face. This character may be combined with a

dakuten The , colloquially , is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a mora should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku (sequential voicing). The , coll ...

, forming じ in hiragana, ジ in katakana, and ''ji'' in

; the pronunciation becomes (phonetically or in the middle of words). The dakuten form of this character is used when transliterating "di" occasionally, as opposed to チ's dakuten form, or a de assigned to a small i; for example, ''Aladdin'' is written as アラジン ''Arajin'', and

radio Radio is the technology of communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 3 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmitter connec ...

is written as ラジオ. In the

Ainu language Ainu (, ), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu (), is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isola ...

, シ is used to represent the sound. It can also be written as a small ㇱ to represent a final s sound, pronounced .

Stroke order

Other communicative representations

References