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we
hiragana katakana
transliteration	e, we
hiragana origin	恵
katakana origin	恵
Man'yōgana	廻 恵 面 咲
spelling kana	かぎのあるヱ Kagi no aru "e"
unicode	U+3091, U+30F1
braille

ゑ in hiragana, or ヱ in katakana, is an obsolete Japanese kana that is normally pronounced in current-day Japanese. The combination of a W-column kana letter with "ゑ゙" in hiragana was introduced to represent in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is presumed that 'ゑ' represented [we] , and that ゑ and え indicated different pronunciations until somewhere between the Kamakura and Taishō periods, when they both came to be pronounced as 'イェ' [je] , later shifting to the modern 'エ' . Along with the kana for wi ('ゐ' in hiragana, 'ヰ' in katakana), this kana was deemed obsolete in Japanese in 1946 and replaced with え and エ. It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia or foreign words, the katakana form 'ウェ' (U-) is used, as in "ウェスト" for "west".

The kana still sees some modern-day usage as a stylistic variant of 'え/エ'. Ebisu is usually written as "えびす", but sometimes "ゑびす" like Kyoto Ebisu Shrine (京都ゑびす神社, Kyōto Webisu Jinja), and name of the beer Yebisu (ヱビス), which is actually pronounced "Ebisu". The Japanese title of the Rebuild of Evangelion series is Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition (ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版, Wevangeriwon Shin Gekijōban). VTuber Sakamata Chloe (沙花叉クロヱ) of Hololive Production uses Katakana ヱ (we) in place of the pronounced エ (e). Katakana ヱ is sometimes written with a dakuten, ヹ, to represent a /ve/ sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this, and the digraph ヴェ is far more common. The Meiji-era Classical Japanese version of the Bible renders Jehovah as ヱホバ (Yehoba), and ヱ (ye) is also used to transcribe any Hebrew name spelled with Je in English (pronounced "ye" in Hebrew, though), such as Jephthah (ヱフタ, Yefuta); the modern Japanese version, on the other hand, only uses エ (e), hence エホバ (Ehoba) and エフタ (Efuta).

Hiragana ゑ is still used in several Okinawan orthographies for the mora /we/. In the Ryūkyū University system, ゑ is also combined with a small ぃ (ゑぃ/ヱィ), to represent the sound /wi/. Katakana ヱ is used in Ainu for /we/.

Stroke order

Stroke order of both ゑ and ヱ

Animated	Diagram

The hiragana ゑ is made with one stroke. It resembles a hiragana る that continues with a double-humped ん shape underneath.

The katakana ヱ is made with three strokes:

1. A horizontal line that hooks down and to the left.
2. A vertical line, just grazing the end of the first stroke.
3. A long horizontal line across the bottom.

Other communicative representations

Japanese Navy Signal Flag	Japanese semaphore	Japanese manual syllabary (fingerspelling)	Braille dots-235 Japanese Braille

• Full Braille representation

ゑ / ヱ in Japanese Braille
ゑ / ヱ we	ヹ ve	ゑい / ヱー wē/wei	ヹー vē/vei

• Computer encodings

References

1. 京都ゑびす神社
2. Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) . "Shift-JIS to Unicode".
3. Unicode Consortium; IBM. "EUC-JP-2007". International Components for Unicode.
4. ^ Standardization Administration of China (SAC) (2005-11-18). GB 18030-2005: Information Technology—Chinese coded character set.
5. Unicode Consortium; IBM. "IBM-970". International Components for Unicode.
6. Steele, Shawn (2000). "cp949 to Unicode table". Microsoft / Unicode Consortium.
7. Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) . "BIG5 to Unicode table (complete)".
8. van Kesteren, Anne. "big5". Encoding Standard. WHATWG.
9. Apple Computer (2005-04-05) . "Map (external version) from Mac OS Japanese encoding to Unicode 2.1 and later". Unicode Consortium.
10. Project X0213 (2009-05-03). "Shift_JIS-2004 (JIS X 0213:2004 Appendix 1) vs Unicode mapping table".
11. Project X0213 (2009-05-03). "EUC-JIS-2004 (JIS X 0213:2004 Appendix 3) vs Unicode mapping table".

See also

• U (kana)
• E (kana)

• Specific kana