Kana ligature
kana ligature representing multiple syllables; e.g. ヿ for "koto", 𬼀 for "shite", 𪜈 for "tomo", ゟ for "yori", 𬼂 for "nari"
In the Japanese writing system, kana ligatures (Japanese: 合略仮名, Hepburn: gōryaku-gana) are ligatures in the kana writing system, both hiragana and katakana. Kana such as koto (ヿ; from 事) and shite (𬼀; from 為) are not kana ligatures, but polysyllabic kana. Most of such ligatures and polysyllabic kanas became obsolete.
History
These characters were widely used until a spelling reform decreed that each sound (mora) would be represented by one (kana) character. In January 1900, the Kana Investigation Committee (仮名調査委員) passed a resolution to "limit the number of homophone kana characters to one each" and aimed to abolish hentaigana, iteration marks, long-vowel marks, jionkanazukai, the characters ゐ/ヰ (wi) and ゑ/ヱ (we), as well as the ligatures and the polysyllabic kanas.
Kana ligatures such as (toki), (koto), etc., were actively used in Japan during the Edo and Meiji periods. These ligatures were sometimes placed together along with the hiragana and katakana syllabaries in Japanese school textbooks. Nowadays, these ligatures are obsolete and are not taught at schools anymore.
Encoding standards
These ligatures were not represented in computer character encodings until JIS X 0213:2000 (JIS2000) added ゟ (yori) and ヿ (koto). In 2002, ヿ and ゟ were added to Unicode 3.2.
“Kana ligature” enters the record as kana ligature representing multiple syllables; e.g. ヿ for "koto", 𬼀 for "shite", 𪜈 for "tomo", ゟ for "yori", 𬼂 for "nari". Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kana, ligature and kana can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11412522. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1900, 2000 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kana ligature” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.