Wo (kana)

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wo
hiragana katakana
transliteration	o, wo
hiragana origin	遠
katakana origin	乎
Man'yōgana	乎 呼 遠 鳥 怨 越 少 小 尾 麻 男 緒 雄
spelling kana	尾張のヲ (W)owari no "(w)o"
unicode	U+3092, U+30F2
braille

を, in hiragana, or ヲ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. Historically, both are phonemically /wo/, reflected in the Nihon-shiki wo, although the contemporary pronunciation is [o] ^ⓘ, reflected in the Hepburn romanization and Kunrei-shiki romanization^[1] o. Thus it is pronounced identically to the kana o. Despite this phonemic merger, the kana wo is sometimes regarded as a distinct phoneme from /o/, represented as /wo/, to account for historical pronunciation and for orthographic purposes.