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Single Character Gairaigo: Furigana

Typographically, furigana are often centered over the entire word or root when indicating readings for jukujikun, which are kanji used for their meaning rather than sound. Jukujikun can be considered a form of ateji, which uses kanji for sound alone rather than meaning alone as in jukujikun. Many jukujikun began as gikun, improvised kanji spellings, and some words have multiple spellings like "hototogisu" which has over 10 variants. Some rare kanji also have readings borrowed from foreign languages written in katakana, like page (pe-ji) and button (bo-tan).

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109 views1 page

Single Character Gairaigo: Furigana

Typographically, furigana are often centered over the entire word or root when indicating readings for jukujikun, which are kanji used for their meaning rather than sound. Jukujikun can be considered a form of ateji, which uses kanji for sound alone rather than meaning alone as in jukujikun. Many jukujikun began as gikun, improvised kanji spellings, and some words have multiple spellings like "hototogisu" which has over 10 variants. Some rare kanji also have readings borrowed from foreign languages written in katakana, like page (pe-ji) and button (bo-tan).

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elle
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Typographically, the furigana for jukujikun are often written so they are centered across the entire word,

or for
inflectional words over the entire root—corresponding to the reading being related to the entire word—rather than
each part of the word being centered over its corresponding character, as is often done for the usual phono-
semantic readings.
Broadly speaking, jukujikun can be considered a form of ateji, though in narrow usage "ateji" refers specifically to
using characters for sound and not meaning (sound-spelling), rather than meaning and not sound (meaning-
spelling), as in jukujikun.
Many jukujikun (established meaning-spellings) began life as gikun (improvised meaning-spellings). Occasionally a
single word will have many such kanji spellings; an extreme example is hototogisu (lesser cuckoo), which may be
spelt in a great many ways, including 杜鵑, 時鳥, 子規, 不如帰, 霍公鳥, 蜀魂, 沓手鳥, 杜宇,田鵑, 沓直鳥, and 郭公
—many of these variant spellings are particular to haiku poems.

Single character gairaigo[edit]


In some rare cases, an individual kanji has a reading that is borrowed from a modern foreign language (gairaigo),
though most often these words are written in katakana. Notable examples include pēji (頁、ページ,
page), botan (釦／鈕、ボタン, button), zero (零、ゼロ, zero), and mētoru (米、メートル, meter). See list of single
character gairaigo for more. These are classed as kun'yomi of a single character, because the character is being
used for meaning only (without the Chinese pronunciation), rather than as ateji, which is the classification used
when a gairaigo term is written as a compound (2 or more characters). However, unlike the vast majority of
other kun'yomi, these readings are not native Japanese, but rather borrowed, so the "kun'yomi" label can be
misleading. The readings are also written in katakana, unlike the usual hiragana for native kun'yomi. Note that
most of these characters are for units, particularly SI units, in many cases using new characters (kokuji) coined
during the Meiji period, such as kiromētoru (粁、キロメートル, kilometer, 米 "meter" + 千 "thousand").

Other readings[edit]
Some kanji also have lesser-known readings called nanori (名乗り), which are mostly used for names (often given
names) and in general, are closely related to the kun'yomi. Place names sometimes also use nanori or,
occasionally, unique readings not found elsewhere.
For example, there is the surname 小鳥遊 (literally, "little birds at play") that implies there are no predators, such as
hawks, present. Pronounced, "koto

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